He Waited Nine Years in Prison for His Lawyer to File a Single Brief. In This State, There’s No Rule Against It. by Samantha Melamed and Dylan Purcell, The Philadelphia Inquirer Co-published with The Philadelphia Inquirer October 13, 2026, 5:00 am

He Waited Nine Years in Prison for His Lawyer to File a Single Brief. In This State, There’s No Rule Against It. by Samantha Melamed and Dylan Purcell, The Philadelphia Inquirer Co-published with The Philadelphia Inquirer October 13, 2026, 5:00 am https://www.propublica.org/article/post-conviction-legal-delays-pennsylvania?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=secondary “We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.”   — Nolan O’Neal, Pennsylvania prisoner Nolan O’Neal has spent years in a Pennsylvania prison insisting he’s innocent of murder. At his 2005 trial, four eyewitnesses recanted, saying police had pressured them to accuse O’Neal. His court-appointed lawyer, Scott Galloway, who joined the case in 2013, was supposed to help O’Neal file a petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act. That law provided a narrow path to freedom if Galloway could find crucial new evidence or prove that previous lawyers had mishandled the case. But court records do not show that Galloway did much other than ask for more time. In 2022, after nine years, one unsuccessful request to access evidence and 41 extensions, Galloway filed a two-page petition addressing just one of the many issues O’Neal had wanted him to raise. It would not be enough to get O’Neal his day in court. For more than half a century, Pennsylvania has promised people who claim they didn’t get a fair trial the right to “effective” post-conviction legal representation, regardless of their ability to pay. Yet Pennsylvania has done little to fulfill that promise. The state’s loose rules and its failure to fund post-conviction work have made the type of breakdown O’Neal encountered a recurring feature of this system. Galloway said that his ethical obligation to confidentiality prevented him from commenting. O’Neal is still fighting his case, now with a new court-appointed lawyer.