Andre Burley was a 19-year-old Black male from Philadelphia whose death is listed by the National Gun Violence Memorial as a gun-violence death on August 24, 2005, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A later Pennsylvania Superior Court memorandum gives a conflicting court-record date, stating that Michael Smith fatally shot Burley on October 24, 2005. The court record describes the killing as growing out of a dispute over how to divide proceeds from drug sales, a disagreement that ended with Burley
being shot and killed.
The investigation did not remain open without a named suspect. According to the appellate record, Michael Smith confessed to a Philadelphia detective after the shooting. That confession became a key part of the criminal case that followed, and Smith was prosecuted in Philadelphia County under criminal docket numbers CP-51-CR-0701861-2006 and CP-51-CR-0701881-2006.
Smith was ultimately tried before a jury and convicted of first-degree murder and carrying a firearm without a license. On August 14, 2007, the trial court sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the murder conviction, plus an additional 3½ to 7 years in prison for the firearm offense.
After sentencing, Smith pursued appeals and post-conviction filings. He filed a timely notice of appeal in September 2007, but the Superior Court later affirmed his judgment of sentence in November 2009. He then filed PCRA petitions in 2009 and 2010, which were dismissed in 2012. Years later, in 2017, he filed another PCRA petition claiming newly discovered evidence related to counsel's failure to appeal, but the court dismissed it as untimely, and the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed that dismissal in June 2018.
