Nov 18, 2009 By Jennifer Harr 2 min read

A federal appellate judge transferred the appeal of a 31-year-old murder case back to the Western District Court in Pittsburgh to determine if the matter should be heard. Judge Dolores K. Sloviter, a jurist with the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, indicated that David Munchinski’s lawyer, Noah Geary, made a basic showing that his post-conviction petition has newly discovered evidence.

“Our determination does not preclude the commonwealth from opposing the petition,” Sloviter wrote.

The district court will have to determine issues like timeliness, exhaustion, procedural default “and, if reached, the merits of Munchinski’s claim,” she wrote.

Munchinski, 54, of Latrobe was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for killing James P. Alford and Raymond Gierke at a chalet in Bear Rocks, Fayette County, on Dec. 2, 1977.

Munchinski has been in prison since his conviction in 1986, and has mounted numerous appeals in both the state and federal court systems.

The appeals were consistently denied until 2004 when a visiting judge reviewed the case and vacated the convictions in the case.

Northumberland County Senior Judge Barry Feudale said investigations showed that Fayette County prosecutors who tried the case withheld evidence.

Munchinski’s convictions were eventually reinstated by the state Superior Court, and the state Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Geary subsequently filed an appeal with the Western District Court, but a judge there asked the 3rd Circuit Court to determine if the matter was a second or successive petition.

The appellate court’s ruling essentially found that there was something new to the appeal, and remanded it to the Pittsburgh court to determine what should be done to resolve the appeal.

Last month, a visiting judge ordered Fayette County officials to pay Geary $25,000 for state court appeals associated with the case from several years ago.

The payments covered work Geary, a Washington County attorney, did on the case four years ago.

The payments are evenly spread out at $5,000 yearly through 2013.

The county is not on the hook for Geary’s work on the federal case.