Police found a handgun in the car which ballistics tests linked to the murder of Jerome Slobodkin, a Philadelphia jeweler who had been shot to death on February 19, 1991.
[8] On July 16, 1997, then governor Tom Ridge signed a death warrant for Bronshtein, authorizing his execution by lethal injection.
[13] On February 17, 1999, Ridge signed another death warrant for Bronshtein, who was now in the Rockview Pennsylvania State Prison, scheduling his execution for 8 April 1999.
Dershowitz filed an affidavit with Bronshtein's appeal claiming that executing him without a proper psychiatric evaluation would be tantamount to assisting in the "judicial suicide of this incompetent prisoner.
At the end of April 1999 he requested and was consequently granted, unopposed by Montgomery County District Attorney Mary Killinger, a 120-day stay of execution.
[20] On 5 July 2001, United States district court judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. ordered that Bronshtein be retried for the Gutman murder.
Future U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for the Third Circuit, rejecting Castor's reasoning because Pennsylvania had only enforced its filing deadlines sporadically.
[26] In October 2007, Montgomery County judge William Furber ruled that Bronshtein was not competent to assist in a new sentencing hearing because psychiatrists had found him to be "psychotic with paranoid features."