The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has once again vacated the death penalty for a man found guilty of a 1994 strangulation, ruling on Thursday that his counsel was ineffective because the attorney failed to object to evidence that painted the accused as an aspiring serial killer.

Wayne Smith will be allowed to have another penalty-phase hearing, where a jury will decide if he should be given a death sentence on a first degree murder conviction secured nearly 31 years ago, according to a 28-page opinion.

The high court came to its decision after finding that jurors were allowed to hear irrelevant and highly prejudicial evidence before unanimously agreeing in 2012 that Smith should be sentenced to death.

While Smith's attorney initially objected to the evidence's appearance, the lawyer did not oppose it when the Commonwealth presented it to the jury, the opinion said. This failure meant that Smith's original objection was not preserved for the purposes of an appeal, the opinion noted.

The high court said that Smith's counsel "rendered ineffective assistance by failing to object properly to the admissibility of the reading-material and serial-killer evidence." The opinion reversed a Delaware County Court's February 2024 order, which dismissed Smith's challenge to the 2012 outcome.

The three-decade legal saga begins with Smith being accused of strangling Eileen Jones in 1994. Just a year later, he was convicted of first degree murder. He was sentenced to death, a sentence initially upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1997. But, following another appeal, the high court vacated, in 2010, the death sentence and ordered a new penalty hearing due to ineffective assistance of counsel, according to the opinion.

At his 2012 resentencing, a jury again imposed death based on certain evidence that is at issue. This evidence included testimony from Smith's brother, his ex-girlfriend and a detective, who all said that Smith wanted and fantasized about becoming a serial killer. These statements were supported by books Smith allegedly read, which included topics like serial killer Ted Bundy and how to commit the "perfect crime," the opinion said.
Smith appealed the sentence directly to the state supreme court, specifically attacking the trial court's decision to allow the jury to hear the serial killer evidence. In its 2015 decision, the court affirmed the death sentence. Notably, it found that Smith had waived his challenge to the admission of the evidence because his attorney at the resentencing had failed to make a timely and specific objection, according to the opinion.

Smith appealed again in 2017, this time arguing that his attorney did not provide adequate legal assistance by not objecting to the evidence, according to the opinion.

Smith's counsel, who was not named in the opinion, would later testify that he did not persist in objecting to the evidence because the "case law was not on my side."

The high court took issue with this answer because the attorney did not say which case law he discovered that allowed the evidence in. The court additionally noted that this answer was different from what the lawyer initially claimed, which was that he could not find any case law to support the objection.

"This testimony in no way addresses the admissibility of the serial-killer evidence," the high court said. "Simply put, resentencing counsel's testimony does not mitigate his failure to object properly to the evidence at issue."

Counsel information for the high court appeal was not immediately available.

The case is the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Wayne A. Smith, case number 815 CAP, in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, Eastern District.

--Editing by Vaqas Asghar.