Feb 16, 2019 3 min read

In her quest to avoid the death penalty for the starvation death of her 7-year-old daughter, Michelle Tharp will now be represented by a Philadelphia lawyer.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of “Philadelphia lawyer” says the term “dates back to the colonial period, when our legal system was in its infancy and lawyers had to be especially astute.”

Washington County Judge John DiSalle appointed Michael Wiseman of Philadelphia, former member of the federal community defender office, capital habeas corpus unit to handle Tharp’s case.

Taxpayers will be responsible for a $150-per-hour fee to represent Tharp in the death penalty phase that the state Supreme Court ordered five years ago.

In a conference call Friday afternoon in open court, Wiseman accepted the appointment and hourly fee, but balked at a $7,500 cap.

DiSalle said there are exceptions to the rule regarding the cap.

To give Wiseman the ability to familiarize himself with the case, DiSalle told him and Assistant District Attorney John Friedmann he expects to convene a status conference in May.

Tharp, 50, an inmate at SCI-Muncy, Lycoming County, was not present in Washington County Court Friday.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld Tharp’s first-degree murder conviction obtained in 2000, but ordered a new penalty phase because it found her public defender was ineffective.

James J. McHugh Jr., first assistant defender in the Defender Association of Philadelphia appealed a ruling last year in which President Judge Katherine B. Emery refused to unilaterally reduce Tharp’s death sentence to life imprisonment and ordered a jury to be empaneled to decide Tharp’s fate.

Tharp’s daughter, Tausha Lanham, lived for seven years in Burgettstown and weighed less than 12 pounds when she died. Tharp and her boyfriend at the time, Douglas Bittinger, reported her missing April 18, 1998, at a Steubenville mall, but police said they dumped her body along a road in Follansbee, W.Va.

Tharp claimed to have fed Tausha the day before she died. A medical examiner testified the girl had not eaten for several days, suffered from malnutrition and her teeth were worn from grinding, common in juvenile starvation cases.

In argument before the president judge, Tharp’s lawyers pegged their client’s intelligence quotient of 71 on a scale where 100 is considered normal, as well as outlining the abuse and abandonment she had suffered. They said Tharp sought medical attention for the prematurely born Tausha, whose condition mystified doctors.

Bittinger, 46, the father of Tharp’s fourth child, was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to criminal homicide, endangering the welfare of a child and abuse of a corpse. Prosecutors said Bittinger’s crime was failing to prevent Tharp’s abuse of Tausha, and he testified against Tharp at her trial.

Bittinger is no longer listed among Pennsylvania’s prison population and the last entry in a court database was the forwarding of a docket sheet July 9 by Washington County Clerk of Courts Frank Scandale at the request to the state Board of Probation and Parole.