Over the past several years, muddled case law and court rules have weakened the gatekeeper role of preliminary hearings to the point where they were essentially a rubber stamp for prosecutors, defense attorneys say, but they now express hope the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has changed direction with a recent ruling about the role of hearsay during these threshold proceedings.

On Tuesday, the high court ruled 4-3 in Commonwealth v. McClelland to clarify that prosecutors must use more than hearsay evidence at the preliminary hearing stage if they want their cases to be allowed to move on for trial. The decision, long-awaited by the criminal defense bar, reversed a Superior Court decision that had disregarded a more than 30-year-old Supreme Court ruling that had ended in a jumbled plurality decision.