David Norman Wecht was born on May 20,1962 and is an American attorney and jurist, who has served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania since 2016.
10 Facts About David Wecht
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David Wecht was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 20,1962.
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David Wecht's mother spent the first six years of her life living under Nazi occupation in Norway.
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David Wecht then attended Yale Law School where he served on the Yale Law Journal and graduated in 1987.
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David Wecht served as Allegheny County's elected register of wills and clerk of orphans' court from 1998 to 2003, and then trial judge from February 2003 until January 2012, working extensively in the civil and family divisions.
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David Wecht ran as a Democrat for Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2015, and was part of a Democratic sweep of all three court vacancies, along with Kevin Dougherty and Christine Donohue.
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David Wecht campaigned on a "five-point plan" to improve transparency and ethical standards in the Pennsylvania judiciary, calling for a ban on nepotism and gifts to judges, "mandatory ethics training" for judges, a requirement that judges state for the record why they are recusing themselves from a case, and the implementation of cameras in the courtroom except in the cases of child abuse and juvenile cases.
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In June 2021, David Wecht ruled that the prosecutor who brought the case against Bill Cosby was bound by the promise his predecessor, Bruce Castor, made to not prosecute Mr Cosby.
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David Wecht wrote that Mr Cosby relied on this promise when giving otherwise incriminating testimony in the civil case Andrea Constand brought against him in 2005.
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The decision lamented what David Wecht sees as the judiciary permitting testimony akin to character attacks.