True Crime Files: My Most Memorable Cases by Kathryn Casey

Author:Kathryn Casey [Casey, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 12677737
Publisher: Kathryn Casey
Published: 2011-07-19T05:00:00+00:00

Photo: Robinson in prison

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ASSUMED THAT would be the end of it, that Harvey Miguel Robinson would become just another inmate on death row waiting for his appointment with a lethal injection. But despite the pile of convictions, Robinson’s attorneys didn’t give up. Instead they filed more appeals, saying that the cases against him were flawed. They charged everything from racial bias on the jury to claiming that a witness who’d testified to seeing Robinson’s car near the site where Schmoyer was murdered had recalled the incident during hypnosis.

To Denise, none of what she saw happening - all the efforts and money being expended to save Robinson - made sense. She worried that Robinson’s attorneys would find a way to put their client back on the streets: “Harvey Robinson wants to kill…and there were lawyers fighting for him to be free,” she says. “If they let these bad guys go, who’s going to protect the good people?”

Through it all, Robinson appeared to enjoy being the center of attention. At a hearing regarding his appeal, Robinson arrived with a grin and greeted his mother as he walked in the door. Throughout the hearing he conferred with his attorney, helping him argue the case. When Robinson noticed Denise in the audience, he turned and smiled at her. Although handcuffed and shackled, he leered at her, and she felt the sense of dread she’d tried to put behind her in the years since his conviction resurface yet again. To her horror, he then mouthed: “I’m going to get you.”

Still, she didn’t give in. “No, I’m going to get you,” she mouthed back.

As upsetting as it all was, events would take an even darker turn. The first blow came when a county judge, Edward D. Reibman, upheld all three of Robinson’s murder convictions and the death penalty in the last of the killings - the Fortney case - but set aside the other two death sentences, those for murdering Burghardt and Schmoyer. His ruling was based on his determination that the instructions given to the jurors hadn’t been correct. The law they’d been given to use to sentence Robinson didn’t adequately separate all three of the cases. Now only one of the death penalties stood, and Robinson would have to be given new sentencing trials for what he’d done to Schmoyer and Burghardt.

Meanwhile as even more appeals filed on Robinson’s behalf crawled through the labyrinth of the legal system, a U.S. Supreme Court decision assured that Robinson would never die for his brutal murder of Joan Burghardt. In 2005, a decade after Robinson’s last trial, the high court ruled that defendants who were under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes could not be put to death. Since Robinson had been 17 on the night he strangled Burghardt, that death sentence was automatically commuted to life.

Yet there was that third death sentence - the one for the Fortney case. The following February, 11 years after Robinson’s last trial, Pennsylvania’s then-governor, Edward G.

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