Jeffrey Manning retires from Allegheny County Common Pleas Court

Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning, who served on the bench for more than 30 years, has retired.

Appointed in 1988, Manning, who previously worked as a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Pittsburgh, was elected to his first 10-year term in 1989.

He was retained three times and served a five-year term as president judge that ended in 2018.

When current President Judge Kim Berkeley Clark was a prosecutor, she tried cases before Manning for more than 10 years.

“(T)here was no better trial judge. His rulings were sound and sentences fair,” she said. “Judge Manning taught me a lot about what it means to be a judge and about the importance of procedural justice.”

During his career on the bench, Manning, 74, of Mt. Lebanon, presided over some of the most high-profile cases in Allegheny County, including the death penalty cases of Richard Baumhammers, who was convicted of killing six people in a racially motivated, multiple-county killing spree, and Richard Poplawski, convicted of killing three Pittsburgh police officers in 2009.

Long-time defense attorney Patrick Thomassey was a law student when he first met Manning in the DA’s office. Manning was his first boss.

“He used to kick me around and make me write his briefs,” Thomassey said.

The two became close friends and remained so for decades.

“He was probably the best judge I ever appeared in front of — on the law, in how he conducted a trial,” Thomassey said.

He said that Manning knows the rules of evidence better than anyone he’s ever known.

“If you need to know about a piece of evidence, he can tell you how to get it in, and he can tell you how to keep it out,” Thomassey said. “He’s that good.”

Manning could easily recount the most minute of details of cases he prosecuted decades earlier and reveled in sharing those stories when they became relevant in contemporary cases.

In addition to his legal acumen, Manning was known in the courthouse for his loyalty to colleagues and friends.

Those close relationships, in part, led in 2007 to a yearlong federal grand jury investigation into whether Manning received gifts from attorneys with whom he was friends in exchange for courtroom favors. No charges were ever filed.

Throughout his career, Manning also served as a member of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s Criminal Procedural Rules Committee, a Commissioner of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing and as a member of the Board of Governors of the Allegheny County Bar Association.

Manning also taught trial evidence and advocacy at Duquesne University School of Law. Each week during the semester, his students would gather in the jury box in Manning’s third-floor courtroom to hear him lecture.

“The system is losing a great leader and a great judge,” Thomassey said.