Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Appellee v. Brentt Michael Sherwood, Appellant

Summary

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed Brentt Michael Sherwood's first-degree murder conviction and death sentence for the beating death of his four-year-old stepdaughter, Marlee Reed. The court held the evidence sufficient to establish specific intent to kill and malice, admitted the victim's statements to her mother as excited utterances and the prior-abuse testimony under the prior-bad-acts doctrine, upheld all three search warrants under the totality-of-the-circumstances test, and rejected the claims that his pre-custody request for counsel and alleged warrant defects required suppression of his statements or the physical evidence. It sustained the torture and child-under-twelve aggravators, waived the unpreserved weight-of-the-evidence and jury-instruction claims, deferred ineffectiveness claims to collateral review, and found no cumulative error warranting a new trial.