Third Circuit Uses Inherent Power of the Court to Dismiss State’s Notice to Seek Death Penalty Against Defendant
It is well established that judges wield the inherent power of the court. This was the power wielded in the Terrance Lewis case which we covered on Undisclosed. As I wrote in my article, Rectifying Wrongful Convictions Through the Dormant Grand Jury Clause,
Courts maintain an inherent power to correct miscarriages of justice in certain circumstances. In deciding whether to apply this power, courts consider factors such as “the clarity of the error, its gravity, its character…, the impact of the error on the defendant, the impact of correcting the error on the government, and the extent to which the defendant acquiesced in the result.” Courts have applied their inherent power to strike down wrongful convictions. They used to apply this power somewhat broadly to forgive untimely actual innocence habeas petitions before Congress largely limited this power by enacting the one-year Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”) statute of limitations. This AEDPA statute of limitation had been an issue for Terrance Lewis, also known as “Stink,” when I started working on his case for the Undisclosed podcast. Lewis was seventeen years old when he and two other men were convicted of the 1996 murder of Hulon Howard in his home in Philadelphia. At a federal habeas hearing, an eyewitness testified that Lewis was not one of the three men she saw enter and leave Howard’s home shortly before and after the shooting, and one of Lewis’s alleged accomplices testified that Lewis was not involved in the crime. In 2010, Magistrate Carol Sandra Moore Wells found that Lewis was actually innocent but that his habeas petition was untimely and thus procedurally barred under the AEDPA.
While I worked on Lewis’s case, he had a pending resentencing hearing under Miller v. Alabama as a juvenile lifer and had filed a successor habeas petition as well as a petition with the Philadelphia CIU. When reviewing the police file in Lewis’s case for the podcast, we found previously undisclosed notes from a police interview with the State’s key eyewitness in which she stated that the perpetrator she knew as “Stink” had the last name Muhammad. This new information might have allowed Lewis’s successor habeas petition to proceed or alternatively might have led to relief from the CIU.
But the State ordered that Lewis had to abandon his habeas claim to get his juvenile resentencing hearing scheduled, and the CIU had not completed its review of the case by the date of that hearing. As Lewis entered the courtroom on May 21, 2019, he fully expected that he would simply be resentenced. Instead, Common Pleas Judge Barbara McDermott began inquiring into the evidence of Lewis’s innocence. Even though the case was only before her for resentencing, Judge McDermott exercised the inherent power of the court to declare Lewis innocent and set him free.
There are other aspects to the inherent power of the court. In Dietz v. Bouldin, 579 U.S. 401 (2016), the Supreme Court held “that district courts have the inherent authority to manage their dockets and courtrooms with a view toward the efficient and expedient resolution of cases.”
Now, in United States v. Dangleben, 2026 WL 1530107 (3rd Cir. 2026), the Third Circuit used this power to issue a major opinion of first impression. In Dangleben, “Richardson Dangleben, Jr. was charged in Virgin Islands Superior Court for first-degree murder and for using a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence.” After some pre-trial back-and-forth, “the District Court ordered the Government to “file any notice pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3593(a) no later than January 12, 2024.” 18 U.S.C. § 3593(a) is the statutory section covering the “Special hearing to determine whether a sentence of death is justified.”
Thereafter, “[o]n February 7, 2024, the Government filed a notice with the District Court that the United States “will not seek the death penalty for Richardson Dangleben, Jr.” But then, “[a] little more than a year after it had represented to the Court that it would not seek the death penalty, on February 12, 2025, the Government moved to stay proceedings for 120 days ‘to review [its] no-seek decision in this capital-eligible case.'” After some more back and forth, on May 21, 2025, “the Government filed a notice to seek the death penalty.” The district court then granted Dangleben’s motion to strike the State’s motion to see the death penalty, ruling, inter alia, that “the Government’s seek notice violated the Court-ordered deadline.”
On appeal, the government claimed that the district court “violated § 3593(a) because the statute requires only that a death notice be filed ‘a reasonable time before the trial.'”
The Third Circuit disagreed, ruling as follows:
Mindful of the black-letter law just noted, we first consider whether § 3593(a) precludes or otherwise displaces a district court’s inherent power to set a deadline by which the Government must notice if it will seek the death penalty. It does not. Recall that § 3593(a) directs the Government to file a seek notice “a reasonable time before the trial.” What constitutes a “reasonable time” will vary from case to case and is committed to the sound discretion of the trial judge. So we hold that § 3593(a) does not displace a district court’s inherent power to manage its cases to ensure a just and fair resolution. In fact, the requirement that the Government file a seek notice within “a reasonable time” will sometimes require the district court to police that line….
Setting a seek deadline is sensible for at least three reasons. First, it allows the court to manage the case fairly and efficiently from start to finish. Second, it helps counsel litigate the case effectively. Third, it ensures that defendants’ rights are protected….
Apart from those considerations, consider the practical effect of the Government’s position. If the Government had carte blanche to revoke its no-seek decisions, defense counsel would have to make decisions about staffing, discovery, and trial strategy as if the case would have a guilt and a penalty phase even after the Government affirmed that it was not seeking the death penalty. The waste of time and expense in those circumstances is obvious.