COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, Respondent v. JASIR HARRIS, Petitioner
No. 21 EAL 2026
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF PENNSYLVANIA EASTERN DISTRICT
Petition for Allowance of Appeal from the Order of the Superior Court
JUSTICE WECHT
I concur in the Court‘s judgment that the instant Petition for Allowance of Appeal does not meet our allocatur standard on its merits.
Nonetheless, the proceedings in this case reveal a problem that is worthy of attention. The process of appellate review in this case deprived a juvenile of a benefit to which the trial court twice deemed him entitled, merely due to the passage of time. Whether the trial court was correct that the juvenile in this case actually was entitled to that benefit is irrelevant. My concern is that, absent any legislative action to provide for such situations within the applicable statutory scheme, cases such as this one will continue to fall into a procedural gap in which the delays attendant to appellate review result in the inability of a court to supply a remedy.
It is important to understand the significance of the age of twenty-one years. The Juvenile Act generally defines a “child” as a person who is under eighteen years old.1
The instant case is illustrative. Jasir Harris was sixteen years old on August 23, 2021. On that date, he fired a handgun at two police officers in Philadelphia who were investigating a carjacking in which Harris was suspected to have taken part. As the Commonwealth sought to charge Harris with two counts of attempted murder, it properly proceeded in adult criminal court in the first instance, given that attempted murder is among those serious crimes that are excluded from the statutory definition of a “delinquent act.”4 Therefore, juveniles who commit that offense generally are charged as adults. Harris filed a decertification motion seeking his transfer to juvenile court,5 which
According to my calculation, at the time of the Superior Court‘s second decision, Harris was twenty years, seven months, and nineteen days old. Tick tock, tick tock. By the time that Harris filed his Petition for Allowance of Appeal with this Court, he was already over twenty-one. The juvenile system already had lost jurisdiction over him. Presently, Harris could be entirely correct that the Superior Court erred, and there is little that this Court could do about it.9 The remedy to which the trial court twice deemed him
This problem reveals a challenging conflict of interests. There is nothing improper in the Commonwealth‘s exercise of its right to appeal an adverse decertification order, and it should not be forced to accept a patently erroneous one. Yet, each day that passes while such an appeal sits on the appellate court‘s docket is one that reduces the juvenile‘s possibility of accessing the benefits of proceeding in juvenile court. At best, valuable time is wasted; at worst, the Commonwealth might be able to achieve the aim of its appeal merely by running the clock until the juvenile turns twenty-one, rather than demonstrating its right to relief on the merits.
Because time is of the essence, the best balance of these interests would be achieved by expediting the process of appeal in cases such as these. There are a number of paths that could lead toward solutions. But each, in my view, requires some form of clarification, either by judicial interpretation or through the procedural rulemaking process.
First, it should be noted that the statutory decertification provision refers to a form of expedited review. Section 6322(c) provides that the “transfer order shall be subject to the same expedited review applicable to orders granting or denying release or modifying the conditions of release prior to sentence, as provided in Rule 1762 of the Pennsylvania Rules of Appellate Procedure.”10 On the surface, this looks like a viable solution. It at least indicates that the General Assembly was aware of the need for expedition in these circumstances. Nonetheless, it is questionable whether the envisioned procedure is as clear as it sounds. Indeed, given that Section 6322 has not been amended since 1995, it is possible that the statute was intended to refer to a procedure that no longer exists. Rule 1762 says nothing of juvenile matters; it speaks to applications for relief relating to
Of course, the language of Section 6322(c) notwithstanding, appellate procedure is not the domain of the General Assembly, but rather of this Court.11 And it is from there that another, likely preferable solution emerges. Through our procedural rulemaking power, this Court has designated certain appeals involving juveniles as “Children‘s Fast Track Appeals,” which, as the name suggests, entails an expedited process for appellate review. Notably, in 2025, we accepted the recommendation of our Appellate Rules Committee to amend the definition of a Children‘s Fast Track Appeal to include orders involving “delinquency.”12 At first blush, a decertification order may look like it could be “an order involving . . . delinquency,” as the goal of the proceeding is to take a criminal prosecution and, in effect, turn it into a juvenile delinquency matter. However, it is far from clear that the language of the definition encompasses juvenile decertification orders. As discussed above, the criminal prosecution of a minor charged as an adult is, by
As things stand, it is unclear whether an appeal from a juvenile decertification order constitutes a Children‘s Fast Track Appeal. I see no reason why it should not be so, given that decertification is another class of proceedings in which a juvenile‘s ever-diminishing youth is legally significant. Perhaps, in an appropriate case, this Court could interpret the term “delinquency” in the definition of a Children‘s Fast Track Appeal to include decertification proceedings. Or, better yet, we could amend the language of Rule 102 to remove the uncertainty.
In the interim, because the instant case does not present a viable vehicle within which to address the problem that I discuss here, I concur in the denial of allocatur.
Justice McCaffery joins this concurring statement.