Mumia Abu-Jamal is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. While on death row, he has written and commented on the criminal justice system in the United States. After numerous appeals, his death sentence was overturned by a federal court. In 2011, the prosecution agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the general prison population early the following year.
MOVE, originally the Christian Movement for Life, is a communal organization that advocates for nature laws and natural living, founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by John Africa. MOVE lived in a communal setting in West Philadelphia, abiding by philosophies of anarcho-primitivism. The group combined revolutionary ideology, similar to that of the Black Panthers, with work for animal rights.
Albert F. Sabo was an American lawyer and judge of the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. He is best known for presiding over the 1982 murder trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Sabo served as a judge from 1974 until his retirement in 1998.
A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic.
Gary Michael Heidnik was an American murderer and serial rapist who kidnapped, tortured and raped six women, murdering two of them, while holding them captive in a self-dug pit in his basement floor in Philadelphia between 1986 and 1987. He was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection in July 1999, currently the last person to be executed in the state of Pennsylvania. Heidnik was one of the inspirations for the character of Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs.
Lynne Marsha Abraham is an American attorney who served as the district attorney of the City of Philadelphia from May 1991 to January 2010. She was the first woman to serve as Philadelphia's district attorney. Abraham won election to that position four times.
George Scott Graham was a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.
The United States Penitentiary, Allenwood is a maximum security United States federal prison in Pennsylvania. It is part of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex and is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice.
The Philadelphia crime family, also known as the Bruno–Scarfo crime family, the Philadelphia–Atlantic City crime family, the Philadelphia Mafia, the Philly Mafia, or the Philadelphia–South Jersey Mafia, is an Italian-American Mafia crime family based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Formed and based in South Philadelphia, the criminal organization primarily operates in Philadelphia and the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, including South Jersey. The family is notorious for its violence, its succession of violent bosses, and multiple mob wars.
Ronald D. Castille served on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 2014 and was chief justice from 2008 to 2014. He stepped down from the court in 2014, after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70.
Washington Goode was an African-American sailor who was hanged for murder in Boston in May 1849. His case was the subject of considerable attention by those opposed to the death penalty, resulting in over 24,000 signatures on petitions for clemency to Massachusetts governor George N. Briggs.
Antuan Bronshtein is a Russian immigrant to the United States, convicted murderer, and reputed associate of the Russian mafia.
Williams v. Pennsylvania, 579 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a prosecutor involved in seeking the death penalty for a defendant should recuse himself if asked to judge an appeal in the capital case.
Kaboni Savage is an American drug dealer, organized crime leader, and mass murderer who is currently on federal death row for ordering the firebombing of a house where a federal witness lived, killing six people. He is the first man from Philadelphia in modern history to receive a federal death sentence. He has twelve convictions for murder in aid of racketeering, one fewer than the Pennsylvania state record, and the most for anyone in Philadelphia. Savage was the first person sentenced to death by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania since the federal death penalty resumed in 1988.
Nicholas James Yarris is an American writer and storyteller who spent 22 years on death row in Pennsylvania after being wrongfully convicted of rape and murder.
Daniel Lee Corwin was an American serial killer who was sentenced to death and executed for murdering three women.
Ellen Rae Greenberg was an American woman who died after sustaining 20 stab wounds. Her death was ruled a suicide, but has been widely described as suspicious.
Alexander McClay Williams was an African-American teenager wrongfully convicted and executed for the 1930 murder of 33-year-old Vida Robare, a matron of the Glen Mills reform school he attended, in Pennsylvania. Williams confessed to the murder, although he later recanted his confession. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wrongfully executed Williams for Robare's murder in 1931 when he was 16 years old, making Williams the youngest person ever executed in Pennsylvania.
William Dean Christensen, known as The American Jack the Ripper, was a Canadian-American serial killer who killed and mutilated at least four people in Canada and the United States between 1982 and 1983. Suspected in 20 further killings across several countries, Christensen was convicted of two murders in Pennsylvania and sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 40 years in Maryland for rape, but he died three years into his sentence.