Harvey Miguel Robinson was sentenced to death in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania on November 10, 1994. He was nineteen. He is still on death row, and the state that sentenced him has not executed anyone since 1999.
He was born in Allentown in 1974. He was seventeen in August 1992 when he killed Joan Burghardt, twenty-nine, beating and stabbing her in her flat. In June 1993 he abducted Charlotte Schmoyer, fifteen, from her newspaper round and killed her. In July 1993 he killed Jessica Fortney, forty-seven, at her home. He raped a five-year-old girl. And he attacked a woman named Denise Sam-Cali twice.
Sam-Cali survived the first attack, and that is why the case ended when it did. Police set a watch on her house on the expectation that he would come back. He came back. An officer shot and wounded him there on July 31, 1993. That the trap was a surviving victim’s own home is the part of the case Allentown remembers.
This archive has a whole category of cases broken by somebody who lived. It is worth saying plainly what it means here: a woman who had already been attacked in her own home stayed in it, with police outside, and the series stopped.
The page that stood here previously opened by saying his case crystallised the issues around a growing trend towards leniency with juvenile offenders. That sentence has the law backwards, and it omits the single most important fact about his death sentence.
He was seventeen at the first killing.
In Roper v. Simmons, decided on March 1, 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments forbid the execution of anyone for a crime committed before their eighteenth birthday. The holding is categorical. It does not turn on the brutality of the offence, on the offender's maturity, or on what a jury concluded. A capital sentence for a killing committed at seventeen cannot stand.
Robinson received three death sentences, one for each murder. He was seventeen for one of them and eighteen for the other two. Whatever else is true of his case, one of those three sentences rests on a killing that the Constitution now places outside the reach of the death penalty.
The archive's own record notes that his sentences have been through repeated appellate review and that a resentencing was ordered in one case. It does not record which case or on what grounds, so the connection is not asserted here. What can be said is that a page about the youngest person sent to American death row should mention the decision that governs how young you can be.
That was not a trend towards leniency. It was a constitutional holding, and it applies whether or not anyone approves of it.
Put his case beside another in this archive and the arbitrariness becomes hard to miss. Craig Price killed a woman in Warwick, Rhode Island in July 1987 at the age of thirteen, and a mother and her two daughters in the same neighbourhood in September 1989 at fifteen. Robinson killed his first victim in Allentown in August 1992 at seventeen. Three years and one state line separate the two series.
Price, who was younger and killed more people, could not be tried as an adult at all. Rhode Island law required a juvenile disposition, and it expired on his twenty-first birthday. Everything that has kept him in prison since was earned in custody, offence by offence. Robinson, four years older at his first killing, received three death sentences.
Both outcomes changed the law, and they changed it in opposite directions. Rhode Island passed a statute allowing juveniles to be tried as adults for serious crimes, too late to apply to Price. The Supreme Court took the death penalty away from anyone who killed before turning eighteen, eleven years too late to have affected Robinson's trial and directly relevant to one of his three sentences. Two teenagers, three years apart, and each case pushed the law towards the position the other case had exposed.
There is a second thing the original page got the wrong way round. It presented the length of the appeals as a scandal, the argument being that the delay makes the death penalty pointless. Look at the sequence again. Robinson was sentenced in 1994. Roper was decided in 2005, eleven years later. If his sentence had been carried out promptly he would have been executed in the 1990s, for a killing that the Supreme Court held in 2005 could not be punished by death at all.
Delay is the mechanism by which a death sentence remains correctable. That is the argument for it, and it is the same argument this archive has arrived at from the other direction more than once: a decision not to prosecute is permanent in a way that a sentence is not, and a sentence carried out is permanent in a way that an appeal is not.
Pennsylvania has not executed anyone since 1999. Three people have been executed there since the death penalty was restored in 1978, and all three had given up their appeals. A governor's moratorium has been in place since 2015. Consent is the only route the state has actually used, which means the appeals the original page called pointless are the mechanism every other condemned prisoner in Pennsylvania has relied on. Robinson has now spent longer under sentence of death than he had been alive when he was sentenced.
So the title of this page describes something that has not happened and, on current form, will not. He was the youngest contemporary serial killer sent to American death row. He was not the youngest executed. The three men Pennsylvania has put to death all consented to it, and he has not; and for one of his three sentences the law now forbids it outright.
None of that is an argument that he should be released, and no one is making one. He was convicted of three murders and the rape of a child, on evidence including his return to the house of a woman he had already attacked while police were waiting in it. The question a page like this actually raises is narrower: what the phrase death row means in a state that has stopped using it, for a man sentenced before the law that governs his youngest offence existed.
Joan Burghardt was twenty-nine. Charlotte Schmoyer was fifteen and was taken off her paper round. Jessica Fortney was forty-seven and was killed in her own home. Denise Sam-Cali survived twice and then let the police wait in her house.