Joan Burghardt was 29 and worked as a nurse’s aide. Charlotte Schmoyer was 15, a high school student. Jessica Jean Fortney was 47 and a grandmother. All three were killed in Allentown, Pennsylvania, between August 1992 and July 1993, not far from the house where Harvey Miguel Robinson lived.
Robinson was 17 when Joan Burghardt died and 18 when the other two were killed, according to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In November 1994 a Lehigh County jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder and returned three sentences of death. One of those sentences still stands. Another was set aside because of the age he had been at the time of the first killing, under a United States Supreme Court decision handed down in 2005. And in March 2026, when Pennsylvania finally set a date for his execution, the governor answered with a reprieve.
What is known of Robinson’s early life comes mostly from court papers, and those papers are thin. His penalty-phase lawyer told the 1994 jury that his client’s life had been shaped by an abusive, alcoholic father. Friends and relatives described him as normal and a loyal friend; four family members testified that they did not believe he was guilty. Robinson himself did not take the stand, although his lawyer said he had begged him to.
His Allentown school records, which became the center of his later appeals, showed a full-scale IQ score of 126 when he was six, in 1981, and a score of 100 when he was fourteen, in 1989. The second test was given while he was living at Harbor Creek, a juvenile placement facility. The records described a boy who was inattentive in class and had been placed in special classes because of his behavior. One psychologist who examined him years later noted that he earned a high school diploma while placed at St. Gabriel’s, another juvenile facility. Before the killings he had also been adjudicated for an assault on a schoolteacher, which prosecutors would later use to prove a significant history of violent felonies.
Joan Burghardt was found dead in Allentown on August 9, 1992. The courts found that she had been beaten to death several days earlier, in the first week of August. No one was charged for almost a year.
A month later, on September 7, 1992, Allentown police stopped Robinson in a traffic stop. He was driving his mother’s blue Ford Tempo, a car with damage along its right side. The stop meant little at the time; two years later it helped prosecutors tie him to the car. On September 23, 1992, he was placed in a juvenile facility on an unrelated charge, and he stayed there until May 14, 1993, the federal district court found.
Charlotte Schmoyer was killed in Allentown on June 9, 1993. She had been stabbed to death.
Her case produced the first witnesses. A city employee saw a blue four-door Ford Tempo with damage on its right side in the area that morning, and a carpenter saw Robinson driving a blue car nearby, according to the federal court’s summary of the trial evidence. Police had stopped Robinson in the same car on June 3. Scientific evidence later linked him to her murder, including DNA and hair evidence, and examiners tied the pattern of one of his sneakers to evidence in her case.
On June 28, 1993, a woman was attacked in her Allentown home. She survived and later identified Robinson as her attacker. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote that he entered her home unlawfully three times in all; the federal court dated the entries to June 28, July 18 and July 31, 1993.
Between the first and second entries into the surviving woman’s home, Jessica Jean Fortney was killed. She was found dead in Allentown on July 14, 1993. She had been beaten and strangled, the courts found, and DNA evidence in her case matched Robinson. His lawyers later put his age at the time at eighteen years and seven months. Hers is the murder for which he remains under sentence of death.
After the second entry, Allentown police concluded that the intruder would return to the surviving woman’s home, and officers were stationed there. At about 1:25 a.m. on July 31, 1993, a man came in. Officer Brian Lewis confronted him, the two exchanged gunfire, and the intruder escaped, the federal district court recorded. WFMZ-TV later reported that he had been shot.
At about 3:30 a.m., Robinson walked into a hospital with fresh wounds. Officer Lewis identified him as the man he had faced inside the house, and the woman identified him as well. He was arrested. Blood found in his mother’s Ford Tempo was later identified as his.
A search of the house where he lived turned up a ski mask, gloves, a shirt, shorts, sneakers and a .380 handgun. The gun had belonged to the surviving woman’s household, and the head stamp on a cartridge from it matched casings recovered in her home after the shooting. Officer Lewis identified the clothing and the sneakers as those the intruder had worn.
Police interviewed Robinson on August 4, 1993. He told them that he never drove the Ford Tempo except to look for work. The federal court later described that statement as contradicted by the evidence at trial: the two traffic stops, the witnesses near the Schmoyer scene, the hospital visit and his own blood inside the car.
Charges for the attacks on the surviving woman were filed on October 12, 1993. The three homicides followed on February 8, 1994, in three separate criminal informations in the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas, Nos. 55, 56 and 58 of 1994. The courts' accounts of the evidence rest on DNA and serology in all three killings, the hair and sneaker evidence in the Schmoyer case, the gun and clothing from his home, and the identifications by the woman and Officer Lewis. Robinson, the district court found, had lived near each of the crime scenes throughout, except during his months in juvenile placement.
On February 28, 1994, he pleaded guilty in the surviving woman’s case to three counts of burglary, two counts of attempted criminal homicide and two firearms counts. He was sentenced to 40.5 to 81 years in prison.
The three murders were tried together. The defense asked for separate trials and argued that news coverage had saturated the local jury pool; both requests were refused. When the claim reached federal court, Judge Joseph F. Leeson Jr. separated factual coverage from inflammatory coverage, weighed the time that had passed before trial, and found no ground for relief. Carmen Marinelli represented Robinson at the guilt phase and James Burke at the penalty phase. Burke, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later observed, had never tried a capital case or any murder case before.
The trial began on October 10, 1994. On November 8 the jury found Robinson guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and of related charges.
The penalty phase began at once. The prosecution told the jurors that Robinson was a danger who would keep committing crimes if he were ever released. It called him "a territorial predator" and warned, "when he gets out, ladies and gentlemen, watch out," according to the Third Circuit’s later account of the record. The defense case for life rested chiefly on Dr. Robert Sadoff, a forensic psychiatrist, who diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and alcohol abuse. Burke used the diagnosis to explain the course of Robinson’s life and told the jury the disorder had never been diagnosed or treated.
During deliberations a juror sent a question to the judge: "On the life in prison, is that without parole, just so we’re sure?" The judge answered that this was the present law, but that the legislature might change it. The prosecution asked for a sidebar. When the judge came back, he told the jury he had misspoken. "There won’t be any parole," he said. "Life is life."
On November 10, 1994, the jury returned a sentence of death for each of the three murders. In every case it found that the killing had been committed during another felony, that Robinson had a significant history of violent felonies and that he had been convicted of another murder; in the Burghardt and Schmoyer cases it also found the aggravating circumstance of torture, a legal finding under the state’s death penalty statute. It found one mitigating circumstance in each case, citing his family background and environment, his use of alcohol and drugs, and his school history. The court formally imposed the sentences on November 29, 1994.
The judge’s first answer to that juror would become the last major question in his appeals.
Robinson’s post-sentence motions took years. After evidentiary hearings in 1998 and 1999, the trial court ruled on June 29, 2001. It upheld the death sentence for the Fortney murder and vacated the death sentences for the Burghardt and Schmoyer murders, finding that the jury had improperly considered the other murders, and it ordered new sentencing hearings in those two cases. The Commonwealth did not appeal. On December 30, 2004, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed all three convictions and the Fortney death sentence, in Commonwealth v. Robinson, 864 A.2d 460. The United States Supreme Court declined to review it in 2005.
That same year the law moved under him. On March 1, 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the United States Supreme Court held by a vote of five to four that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments forbid the death penalty for offenders who were under 18 when they committed their crimes. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority. The defendant in that case, Christopher Simmons, had been 17 at the time of his crime in Missouri.
Robinson had been 17 when Joan Burghardt was killed. On April 25, 2006, a life sentence was imposed in the Burghardt case because he had been under 18, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recorded. Roper did not reach the two later murders, committed after his eighteenth birthday. The Commonwealth continued to seek death in the Schmoyer case until an agreement was reached late in 2012, and a life sentence was imposed there on December 14, 2012. WFMZ-TV reported in 2026 that he had waived his appeal rights in that case in exchange for the life term.
Only the sentence for the murder of Jessica Jean Fortney remained a sentence of death.
Robinson turned next to Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act. He filed a petition on his own on August 3, 2006, and his lawyers from the Federal Community Defender Office filed an amended petition on August 2, 2010. The Lehigh County court heard the evidence in December 2010.
The new case was built on the school records. Robinson’s experts said the fall in his IQ scores, with a reported drop of 42 points in verbal performance, was a warning sign of brain damage that his trial team should have investigated. Dr. Ruben Gur, a neuropsychologist, testified that Robinson had frontal lobe damage that impaired his executive functioning. Dr. Daniel Martell, a forensic psychologist, agreed and said he was shocked that the decline had gone unexamined. Both said the damage predated an assault Robinson suffered in prison in 2006. The prosecution’s experts disagreed: Dr. Thomas Swirsky-Sacchetti found only mild impairment, and Dr. Timothy Michals said he would not have sent Robinson for further testing in 1994.
Everything turned on whether Burke had given the school records to Dr. Sadoff before trial. Sadoff testified that he was "one hundred percent positive" he had not seen them. Burke testified, "I know we gave it to him." The court believed the lawyer and denied relief on June 21, 2012.
On December 27, 2013, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed in an opinion by Chief Justice Castille. It found the trial court’s credibility ruling supported by the record, held that putting the antisocial personality diagnosis before the jury had been a reasonable strategy, and described the aggravating evidence in the Fortney case as "grievously serious," a "mountain" that more mental health evidence would not have moved. It also declined to extend the constitutional bars on executing juveniles and intellectually disabled people to offenders with severe brain damage. Justice Saylor concurred in the result but called the mitigation case "paltry."
Robinson’s federal habeas petition, filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on March 24, 2014, raised fourteen claims. Judge Leeson denied it on September 8, 2020, and refused to reconsider on June 10, 2021. One claim concerned the surviving woman, who had been hypnotized before testifying. In the 2021 ruling the judge held that Robinson’s guilty plea to the offenses against her had admitted the salient facts, and, citing Justice Nigro’s description of the evidence of guilt as "clearly overwhelming," found no reasonable probability of a different outcome.
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals agreed on August 30, 2022 to hear a single question: whether the trial judge’s remark that the legislature might change the parole law had violated Simmons v. South Carolina, the 1994 Supreme Court decision holding that when the prosecution argues a defendant’s future dangerousness, the jury must be told he will never be eligible for parole.
The case was argued on November 28, 2023, by Eric P. Motylinski of the Federal Community Defender Office for Robinson and Heather F. Gallagher of the Lehigh County District Attorney’s Office. On April 4, 2024, Judge Bibas wrote for a panel that also included Judges Jordan and Hardiman. "In weighing life and death, a jury must understand its options," the opinion began. A jury, it went on, may not sentence a defendant to die "because it falsely fears that he might one day be paroled." The court held that the prosecution had in fact put Robinson’s future dangerousness at issue, contrary to the state court’s view, but that the judge’s prompt correction, "Life is life," had cured the error before the jury decided. The full court denied rehearing on July 16, 2024.
Robinson’s lawyers petitioned the United States Supreme Court on October 15, 2024. They asked whether a judge may tell a capital jury that the law could change to allow parole, and whether a federal court may supply its own reasons for upholding a state court’s decision. Lehigh County prosecutors opposed the petition. The Court denied it on January 21, 2025.
Pennsylvania has carried out three executions since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976, and all three men had given up their appeals: Keith Zettlemoyer and Leon Moser in 1995, and Gary Heidnik, who asked to be put to death, in 1999. The last execution in the state of a prisoner who had not consented took place in 1962, Billy Penn reported. In 2015 Governor Tom Wolf imposed a moratorium. His successor, Josh Shapiro, announced on February 16, 2023 that he would sign no execution warrants while in office. "The system is fallible, and the outcome is irreversible," he said.
Pennsylvania law still sets a clock running once a death sentence clears its appeals. When the governor does not sign a warrant within the time allowed, the secretary of corrections has 30 days to issue a notice of execution. On February 23, 2026, Secretary Laurel Harry signed that notice for Robinson, setting the date as March 24, 2026.
Governor Shapiro responded with a reprieve. His proclamation repeated the pledge he had made three years earlier: "I will not authorize any execution warrants during my tenure," and "I will issue a reprieve in every instance." WFMZ-TV reported on March 24, 2026 that Robinson, then 51, was held at the State Correctional Institution at Phoenix in Skippack Township. He remained under sentence of death for the murder of Jessica Jean Fortney, with the reprieve in place, and was serving prison terms for the murders of Joan Burghardt and Charlotte Schmoyer and the 40.5 to 81 years imposed in the surviving woman’s case.
The court papers do not agree on the terms that replaced the Burghardt and Schmoyer death sentences. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote in 2013 that life sentences were imposed in the Burghardt case on April 25, 2006, because Robinson had been under 18, and in the Schmoyer case on December 14, 2012, after an agreement. Robinson’s 2024 petition to the United States Supreme Court says he was resentenced to life without parole in the case in which he had been a juvenile and to life under a negotiated settlement in the other. The federal district court’s 2020 opinion describes the Schmoyer term as 35 years to life because he was a minor and the Burghardt term as life without parole, which does not match the ages the state supreme court gives; its 2021 opinion describes both as life without parole. WFMZ-TV reported in 2026 that he was resentenced to life in the Burghardt case in 2019, after court rulings on sentences for juvenile offenders.
WFMZ-TV listed a five-year-old girl among those who survived Robinson’s attacks and reported that he was convicted in all of them. The court opinions in the case do not describe it.
The brain damage his later lawyers described has not been established in any court. Their experts traced it to his childhood development; the prosecution’s experts disagreed; and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined to decide whether severe brain damage could bar an execution.
• 1981: Robinson records a full-scale IQ score of 126 at age six.
• 1989: At fourteen, while at the Harbor Creek juvenile facility, he scores 100.
• August 9, 1992: Joan Burghardt, 29, is found dead in Allentown. Robinson is 17.
• September 7, 1992: Police stop Robinson in his mother’s blue Ford Tempo.
• September 23, 1992 to May 14, 1993: Juvenile placement on an unrelated charge.
• June 3, 1993: A second traffic stop in the Ford Tempo.
• June 9, 1993: Charlotte Schmoyer, 15, is killed in Allentown.
• June 28, 1993: A woman is attacked in her Allentown home and survives.
• July 14, 1993: Jessica Jean Fortney, 47, is found dead in Allentown.
• July 18, 1993: The intruder enters the surviving woman’s home again.
• July 31, 1993: Officer Brian Lewis exchanges gunfire with the intruder at about 1:25 a.m.; Robinson is identified at a hospital at about 3:30 a.m. and arrested.
• August 4, 1993: Police interview Robinson.
• October 12, 1993: Charges filed in the surviving woman’s case.
• February 8, 1994: Homicide charges filed.
• February 28, 1994: Guilty pleas in the surviving woman’s case; 40.5 to 81 years.
• October 10, 1994: Murder trial opens in Lehigh County.
• November 8, 1994: Guilty of three counts of first-degree murder.
• November 10, 1994: Three death sentences.
• November 29, 1994: Sentences formally imposed.
• June 29, 2001: Burghardt and Schmoyer death sentences vacated; Fortney sentence upheld.
• December 30, 2004: Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirms the convictions and the Fortney death sentence.
• March 1, 2005: Roper v. Simmons decided.
• 2005: U.S. Supreme Court denies review of the direct appeal.
• April 25, 2006: Life sentence imposed in the Burghardt case.
• August 3, 2006: First post-conviction petition filed.
• December 2010: Post-conviction hearings.
• June 21, 2012: Post-conviction relief denied.
• December 14, 2012: Life sentence imposed in the Schmoyer case by agreement.
• December 27, 2013: Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirms the denial.
• March 24, 2014: Federal habeas petition filed.
• September 8, 2020: Habeas relief denied.
• June 10, 2021: Reconsideration denied.
• August 30, 2022: Third Circuit agrees to hear the parole-instruction issue.
• April 4, 2024: Third Circuit affirms.
• July 16, 2024: Rehearing denied.
• January 21, 2025: U.S. Supreme Court denies certiorari.
• February 23, 2026: Notice of execution signed for March 24, 2026.
• March 2026: Governor Shapiro issues a reprieve.