A Philadelphia judge has ordered three men to stand trial in the Jan. 14 beating death of Temple University graduate Kevin Kless.

But in a victory for the defense, Municipal Court Judge Patrick F. Dugan ruled Monday that the three will be tried on a third-degree murder count instead of a general charge of murder in which the jury would decide the degree.

Kless, 23, accompanied by his girlfriend and another woman, was assaulted about 2:30 a.m. as they tried to hail a cab at Fourth and Chestnut Streets in Old City. Three men who apparently believed Kless was yelling at them got out of their car, and Kless was beaten to death in the altercation that followed.

Charged in the assault are Steven Ferguson, 20, of Fox Chase; Kenneth Enriquiz-Santiago, 20, of Juniata Park; and Felix Carrillo , 23, of Olney.

Monday’s ruling followed an April 4 preliminary hearing before Dugan in which Enriquiz-Santiago’s attorney, Lawrence S. Krasner, argued that Kless’ death was the unintended result of a fight -- a case of involuntary manslaughter, not murder. Assistant District Attorney Brendan O’Malley maintained that Kless’ death was a murder case.

Had the case gone to trial on a general murder charge, a jury could have found the trio guilty of first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. A third-degree murder conviction carries a sentence of 20 to 40 years in prison.

The next court date for the three will be June 4, when they will be formally arraigned on the charges before the case starts moving to trial in Common Pleas Court.

A sometime street-corner rapper from North Philadelphia was sentenced Wednesday to 15 to 30 years in prison for his role as the driver in a 2009 drive-by shooting that mistakenly killed a Philadelphia Housing Authority carpenter.

Jamaal Simmons, 28, was found guilty of third-degree murder by a Common Pleas Court jury on Jan. 12 in the July 25, 2009 shooting that mortally wounded Rodney Barnes, a 46-year-old father of four and minister at Mount Airy Church of God in Christ.

The sentence by Judge Carolyn Engel Temin was below the 20- to 40-year maximum for a third-degree murder conviction but also took into account the fact that Simmons was not the triggerman – and has not identified who the gunman was.

Temin noted that Barnes’ family will never have closure knowing that the gunman remains at large.

Simmons apologized to the Barnes family before sentencing.

Barnes was unloading tools from his truck outside the Raymond Rosen Manor housing complex at 24^th and Norris Streets when he was hit by the shot fired by a gunman in a passing van. Barnes had worked for the PHA for just six months and on the afternoon of the shooting was part of a weatherization and maintenance crew.

Trial witnesses identified Simmons as the driver of a van who parked near 23d and Norris Streets about 2 p.m. A gunman got out of the van, walked toward 24th Street, and fired at a man who Gilson said had been involved in a dispute with Simmons. The shot missed the target and struck Barnes in the back of the head. He died Aug. 5, 2009.

Simmons was arrested Sept. 1, 2009, when police in Whitehall, N.Y., stopped a minivan for speeding. A computer check showed that Simmons was wanted in the Philadelphia killing.

Simmons, who has never identified the shooter, did not testify at trial. His then-defense attorney opted not to call any character witnesses after the judge allowed Assistant District Attorney Mark Gilson to them about the violent, graphic imagery in Simmons' rap lyrics.

“I just can’t understand this one,” said defense attorney Janis Smarro, who said Simmons’ lyrics were “battle rap” in which competitors seek to outdo each other’s graphic imagery. Smarro said Simmons had no prior arrest record and was an honors graduate of Benjamin Franklin High School. “He is not the way it was portrayed at trial.”

It’s been 15 months since Dr. Kermit B. Gosnell was accused of murder and related charges by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office for performing illegal late-term abortions at his West Philadelphia women’s clinic.

It's been almost that long since he was last seen in court.

But he was back Thursday – still in custody and looking vigorous at age 71 after a recent heart pacemaker implant – this time in federal court to be arraigned on an amended federal indictment charging him and three employees with selling prescriptions for almost a million pills containing the narcotic painkiller Oxycodone and the generic version of the antianxiety drug Xanax.

Wearing an olive prison jumpsuit, his hands cuffed behind him, Gosnell smiled broadly and winked at defense attorney Emily B. Cherniack as he waited his turn to be arraigned by U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth T. Hey.

Gosnell quietly responded “not guilty” after Hey read the list of charges in the April 11 superseding indictment: conspiracy to distributed controlled substances, counts involving distribution of controlled drugs, and operating a continuing criminal enterprise.

Gosnell and three workers at his Women’s Medical Society Clinic at 3801 Lancaster Ave. were originally charged by the federal grand jury in December 2011 with operating the “pill mill” from 2008 until January 2010. The alleged scheme netted Gosnell at least $200,000 in illegal profits, prosecutors said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Natali said the superseding indictment does not lodge additional criminal charges against Gosnell but does make some editorial changes. Two of Gosnell’s three codefendants were also arraigned Thursday and entered not-guilty pleas.

Four other former Gosnell workers were charged separately in the alleged pill mill’s operation. Three of the four have pleaded guilty and are expected to testify for the government when the case goes to trial.

That could be some time, however. U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe has marked the trial “complex” and a trial date has not been scheduled.

When federal and state investigators raided Gosnell’s clinic in February 2010, it was part of the probe into the sale of prescription pharmaceuticals. Once inside, however, authorities were confronted by what was later described as a “charnel house” of stored and dismembered fetuses – evidence that Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic was performing illegal late-term abortions for poor women.

The clinic and Gosnell became the subject of an investigation by a Philadelphia County grand jury and in January 2011 Gosnell and nine employees were charged by the District Attorney’s office.

Gosnell faces the most serious charges including third-degree murder in the 2009 death of a Virginia woman undergoing an abortion and seven counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of seven infants who were allegedly born live and viable but then killed by Gosnell, who snipped their spinal cords with scissors. Gosnell faces the death penalty if a jury finds him guilty of the first-degree murder charges.

But as with the federal trial, Gosnell will spend months more behind bars before he gets his day in court in the state case. The trial has been set for next March 14 before Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart.

Two former clinic employees will be tried with Gosnell. The remaining seven who were charged, including Gosnell’s wife, Pearl, 51, have pleaded guilty but will not be sentenced until after Gosnell’s trial is over.

The death penalty:

1. Deters people from committing murder.
2. Deters no one from committing murder.
3. Deters a convicted murderer from committing another murder.

The answer is: all of the above, none of the above, your choice.

Confused? So was the National Research Council, the nonprofit face of the expert panels on science, engineering and medicine created by Congress to provide sound advice on the thorny issues of our times.

The council decided that -- 35 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a four-year moratorium on capital punishment in the United States -- now was the time to review the scientific research to see if it was possible to answer whether the death penalty deters would-be killers.

The answer, made public last week in a 144-page book, is: no.

“Fundamental flaws in the research we reviewed make it of no use in answering the question of whether the death penalty affects homicide rates,” wrote Daniel S. Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who chaired the blue-ribbon committee – it included James Q. Wilson, the late political scientist and expert on crime and society -- that wrote the report.

The report found fundamental faults in all the studies purporting to answer the deterrence question.

Some studies simply assumed what potential murderers think about the abstract possibility of the death penalty despite the fact that only 15 percent of inmates condemned since 1976 were actually put to death and many death sentences were reversed.

The studies were also based on the assumption that public and official attitudes toward capital punishment were the same nationwide, rather than varying among the states and over time.

“There is no evidence to support such suppositions,” the report found.

Nor did any of the research consider the possible deterrent impact of life prison terms or other forms of non-capital punishment on homicide rates, the report continued.

“These intrinsic shortcomings severely limit what can be learned from the existing research,” the report concluded.

Although the report’s authors said they believed it possible to scientifically determine if the death penalty affects the homicide rate, they said credible results will depend on using statistical methods to compare the deterrence of capital and non-capital punishment and gauge how potential murderers perceive the possible penalties they would face.

“Some people may find partial conclusions unappealing and may be tempted to impose strong assumptions in order to obtain definitive answers,” the report concludes. “We caution against this reaction. Imposing strong but untenable assumptions cannot truly resolve inferential problems. Rather, it simply replaces the modeling uncertainty with uncertainty associated with the underlying assumptions.”

“Today, more than 30 years later,” the report continues, “perhaps the primary lesson learned from the latest round of empirical research on the deterrent effect of the death penalty is that research and policy makers must cope with ambiguity. Explicitly recognizing and accounting for this uncertainty seems like the only hope of moving forward.”

Thomas P. Doyle is a Dominican priest with a bachelor’s and five master’s degrees, a canonical lawyer with a doctorate in canon law and a veteran expert witness on Catholic theology and the church.

He has also worked to understand the institutional and moral failures behind the abuse of minors by priests since 1984, when the scandal first erupted in the United States in Louisiana.

Doyle appeared in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court last Thursday at the trial of two Catholic priests involving the sexual abuse of children by some priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington wanted Doyle to explain to the jury some of the more esoteric elements of Catholic theology.

Doyle was parsing the Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church and discussing the significance of baptism, the ceremony in which the priest welcomes an infant into the church and washes away “original sin” – Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden – that Catholics believe all people are born with.

That brought Blessington to the concept of “Limbo,” the name in traditional Catholic theology for the afterlife of infants who are not baptized and who die in a state of “original sin.” It’s a netherworld without the promise of Heaven or the punishment of Hell. It’s long been a problematic concept for many Catholics and in 2007 the church’s International Theological Commission suggested that Limbo was one theory about the possible fate of unbaptized infants but did not have the theological surety of Heaven and Hell.

What’s a witness to do? For all his learning, Doyle decided to avoid the arcane and, to the laughter of almost everyone in the courtroom, define Limbo in lay terms.

“The best way I can describe it is minimum-security Hell,” Doyle said.

A man who admitted being peripherally involved in the drug-theft conspiracy that ended with the June 27, 2009 slayings of two people at the Piazza at Schmidts complex in Northern Liberties was sentenced Friday to 6 to 12 years in prison by a Philadelphia judge.

Robert Keith, 30, pleaded guilty last November to conspiracy, burglary and possession an instrument of crime involving a June 27, 2008 break-in at a sixth-floor apartment at the Piazza’s Navona building that he thought held a cache of drugs and cash. Keith was accompanied by Will Hook, the alleged mastermind of the scheme.

But when the two men got inside the sixth-floor apartment the flat was empty: Hook’s information was apparently bad and Keith left the scheme at that point.

Several hours later, one floor above, a group of gunmen confronted Center City event planner Rian Thal, 34, and her friend Timothy Gilmore, 40, outside her apartment in a botched robbery. Police later found more than $100,000 in cash and 8.5 pounds of cocaine inside Thal’s apartment – the treasure Keith and Hook were looking for earlier.

According to trial testimony both Thal and Gilmore, an Ohio-based truckdriver, were involved in drug trafficking.

Keith told Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart that he had accepted responsibility for his role in the burglary, adding, “I’m glad I didn’t take part in the other crime.”

Defense attorney Guy R. Sciolla said Keith has taken 60 hours worth of courses and programs since he was arrested three years ago and is intent of turning his life around.

Minehart seemed impressed and agreed with Sciolla’s recommendation to make Keith’s sentence concurrent to a seven-year federal prison term Keith is serving on a firearms possesson charge.

Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega did not oppose the sentence though he said Keith’s actions “were a serious crime that actually led to something horrific.”

Vega said Keith was sentenced now because he will not be needed to testify at the May 29, 2013 trial of Caesar Holloway, 35, the last of eight persons charged in the Piazza case. Two others who have pleaded guilty – Katoya Jones, 28, and Langdon Scott, 29 – will not be sentenced until after Holloway’s trial where they are expected to testify, Vega said.

One gunman who pleaded guilty and Hook and two other gunman convicted at last year’s trial, are now serving life prison terms without chance of parole.

It was just last July when Philadelphia First Assistant District Attorney Edward McCann nailed down the last three convictions among nine people charged in the horrific 2006 starvation death of Danieal Kelly, the 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who was allowed to literally wither away and die in her mother’s West Philadelphia apartment, her body covered with deep bedsores and lying in her own excrement.

McCann, 48, then 22 years into his career as a city prosecutor, had just been named acting first assistant. The administrative workload he was acquiring, he said, was significant enough that he guessed it would be some time before he went back into a courtroom.

Now, nine months later, McCann is returning to the courtroom to prosecute the parents of Khalil Wimes, the six-year-old South Philadelphia boy who died March 19, allegedly after being starved and beaten over a long period of time.

McCann said the similarities between Danieal’s case and the allegations in Khalil’s death drew him to the Wimes' case: “It’s obviously a passion of mine to prosecute child-abuse cases because of the impact they have on the system to make kids safer.”

Khalil’s parents – Tina Cuffie, 44, and Latiff Hadi, 48, have been charged with murder in their son’s death and are scheduled for a preliminary hearing Wednesday at the city’s Criminal Justice Center although McCann said the hearing will be continued.

Cuffie is being represented by J. Michael Farrell and Hadi by Derrick W. Coker.

Police say Cuffie – whose five other children had been removed from her care by city social welfare workers – brought Khalil to the Children’s Hospital the night of March 19, telling doctors that he had slipped and fell in the bathroom.

Authorities, however, determined that the boy’s death was caused by blunt force trauma to the head. Moreover, Khalil weight just 29 pounds, far less than the 45 pounds that was normal for a child his age. And the boy’s face, neck, back and arms were covering with old scars, which investigators alleged was evidence of regular beatings with belts and cords.

Like his siblings, Khalil also had been removed from his mother’s care. Until age 2, Khalil had lived with foster parents who were related to his father and reportedly thrived.

In 2008, over the pleas of his Khalil’s foster parents, extended family, and court-appointed caseworkers, Family Court Judge Charles Cunningham returned Khalil to his parents, apparently after Cuffie and Hadi testified that they had quit drugs and were back living together.

McCann on Monday said it was too soon to comment about what happened to Khalil and added that his office’s investigation was continuing.

After two months of weighing his options, Caesar Holloway has rejected a guilty-plea deal from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office and will be tried for his alleged role in the 2009 drug-related killings of two people at the Piazza at Schmidts development in Northern Liberties.

Today, Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega and defense attorney Donald Chisholm II confirmed that Holloway, 35, rejected the plea offer. The two lawyers and Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart are to decide on a trial date Wednesday.

Holloway is the last of eight people charged in the June 27, 2009 slayings of event planner Rian Thal, 34, and friend Timothy Gilmore, 40, and faces life in prison without chance of parole if the jury finds him guilty of felony murder. Although not among the gunmen who killed the two in what prosecutors called a botched drug robbery, under the law of conspiracy Holloway is liable for the worst act committed by any other conspirator.

Prosecutors allege that Holloway was the right-hand man of Will “Pooh” Hook, 43, whom a jury convicted of felony murder in December as the mastermind of the drug robbery that became a double murder.

Hook also did not shoot anyone but he is now serving a mandatory life prison term with no chance of parole – the same verdict and sentences as gunmen Donnell Murchison, 35, and Edward Daniels, 44.

Seven people were arrested in the days after the June 27, 2009 slayings of Thal and Gilmore outside her sixth floor apartment in the upscale Piazza’s Navona building.

Holloway, however, was a fugitive for almost a year and thus not part of the trial that saw the jury verdicts against Hook, Murchison and Daniels and guilty pleas of four others.

Holloway’s wavering about whether to plead guilty has prevented the sentencings of three of the four who pleaded guilty and who would likely testify at his trial.

The key witness against Holloway would be Katoya Jones, who lived in the Navona building and admitted letting the gunmen through the building’s security door. Jones said Hook promised her a cut from the cocaine and cash stored in Thal’s apartment.

Jones, the first to cooperate with authorities, is awaiting sentencing on her guilty plea to two counts of third-degree murder.

According to trial testimony, Thal and Gilmore were active in the city's drug trade and her apartment was being used to distribute a load of Mexican cocaine that Gilmore, an Ohio long-distance trucker, had just delivered from Texas. After the shootings, the killers fled empty-handed. Police later found more than $100,000 and 8-1/2 pounds of cocaine in Thal's apartment.

At the trial of Hook, Murchison and Daniels, Jones told the jury about a late-night meeting with Hook and Holloway at a Germantown nightclub where they tried to figure out what went wrong.

Holloway, she testified, sat at the bar, bemoaning that he would not be able to buy an Aston Martin luxury car with what he expected would be his share of the robbery loot.

“First of all, this is not television.”

With those words, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina ended her orientation for 20 jurors – 9 women and 11 men – who Monday began hearing what could be up to three months of testimony in the trial of a church official and priest involving the clergy sex-abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Not television? That’s an understatement.

It’s not just a reality check for jurors. Judges don’t bang gavels to open and close court sessions and most people understand that TV, movies and theater alter reality for dramatic effect.

For jurors, the trial is a crash course in logic and philosophy: learning to live according to a new reality that exists only in a courtroom and has its own language and rules of behavior.

Want to learn the philosopher’s trick of holding two opposing thoughts at the same time? Jurors are told repeatedly that they “are the judge of the facts” and that only their individual, and ultimately collective, memory of testimony and evidence establishes those facts.

Yet the courtroom combatants – prosecution and defense lawyers – will argue with passion and rhetoric that the jury should accept their interpretation of the facts. And then the judge will remind the jurors again that nothing the lawyers and the judge say is evidence, that only the jurors may determine the evidence.

But not quite yet. Jurors have to keep an open mind and not judge what they’ve heard until after the trial ends, the closing arguments are over and the judge instructs them in the law. Which law the jury must apply as the judge instructs them to the facts that only they can decide.

As a juror, you may take notes but your notes are not necessarily better than the memory of a juror who does not take notes. And no cheating. Don’t read newspaper articles about the case, listen to or watch broadcast or cable news, do any original research, visit crime scenes or use any form of social media or the Internet to discuss the case. Don’t talk to your spouse, family, friends, coworkers or anyone else about the case. Don’t even talk to other jurors about the case until you all begin deliberations.

Despite the fact that many citizens consider arrest evidence of guilt, jurors must accept the “presumption of innocence,” that no matter what the defendant is accused of, he or she is not guilty until after the jury hears the evidence and decides guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Not beyond all doubt, the judge will tell the jurors in her instructions before deliberations begin. That’s impossible. It’s beyond the type of doubt that would cause the average person to hesitate in a matter of personal importance: getting married, buying a house, changing jobs.

Got it?

Maybe that’s why some judges remind jurors that jury service is second only to military service among civic duties. Amazingly, despite the cynicism that marks so much of popular culture, my interviews with jurors over the years show most believe it, take the job seriously and are profoundly changed by the experience.

And with good reason: they are now considering the fate of another human being. As veteran defense attorney Thomas A. Bergstrom, who is representing Msgr. William J. Lynn in the trial, reminded the jury in his opening statement: “You’ve been empowered by the Constitution to make sure that this system actually works.”