Jameson Stone Law defends assault and harassment charges across Central Pennsylvania, and Ethan Stone leads the criminal work. These offenses run from a summary citation to a first-degree felony, and the same set of facts can land at very different points on that scale depending on how the charge was written.
The Grading Gap
Simple assault is a second-degree misdemeanor carrying up to two years. Aggravated assault, at its highest grade, is a first-degree felony carrying up to twenty. What sits between them is mostly the word “serious.” Simple assault involves bodily injury. Aggravated assault involves serious bodily injury, or a deadly weapon, or a victim in one of the categories the statute protects.
Bodily injury itself is a low bar, meaning impairment of physical condition or substantial pain, so no visible injury is required. Serious bodily injury is a genuinely high one, requiring substantial risk of death, permanent disfigurement, or protracted loss of function. Charges are frequently written at the higher grade on facts that support the lower one, and moving between them is the single most valuable thing achievable in an assault case. There is also a provision worth knowing about: a fight entered into by mutual consent is a third-degree misdemeanor rather than a second.
Harassment
Harassment covers a wide spread of conduct and grades it in two tiers. Unwanted physical contact, or the threat of it, following someone in a public place, and a course of conduct serving no legitimate purpose are all summary offenses. Communications that are lewd, threatening or obscene, repeated anonymous contact, and repeated contact at unreasonable hours are third-degree misdemeanors instead.
The difference matters more than the labels suggest. A summary offense can be expunged after five arrest-free years. A misdemeanor conviction cannot be expunged at all short of a pardon. Every version of the offense also requires intent to harass, annoy or alarm, which is a state of mind rather than an act, and it is regularly the weakest part of the Commonwealth’s case.
Domestic Charges
Pennsylvania has no separate domestic violence offense. An incident between partners or family members is charged as simple assault, harassment or terroristic threats like any other. What changes is everything around the charge. Once it is filed the decision to proceed belongs to the district attorney, not to the person who called the police, and a request to withdraw it carries no legal weight.
Two consequences follow that people rarely see coming. A Protection From Abuse case can run in parallel as a separate civil matter on a different standard of proof, with its own hearing and its own firearm consequences. And a misdemeanor conviction for an assault against an intimate partner can trigger a federal firearm prohibition that has nothing to do with Pennsylvania law and does not expire. Both need factoring in before anything is resolved.
What We Handle
Misdemeanor charges where the grading, and whether a mutual fight was involved, are both arguable.
Felony charges resting on serious bodily injury, a deadly weapon, or the identity of the complainant.
Summary and misdemeanor charges turning on a course of conduct and on the intent behind it.
Charges arising from a family or partner incident, alongside any parallel protection order proceedings.
Our Process
01
What the medical evidence establishes, and whether it reaches serious bodily injury or stops well short of that threshold.
Who did what first, whether it was mutual, and whether self-defense or the mutual consent grading applies here.
A reduction from felony to misdemeanor, or misdemeanor to summary, changes the exposure and the record permanently.
Charges in this area are usually filed quickly, on one account of what happened, before anybody has taken a statement from the other side. That does not make them wrong, but it does mean the charge as written often reflects a first impression rather than a settled picture of the incident.
It may not be, and it is worth testing rather than accepting. Aggravated assault at the felony level requires serious bodily injury, which the statute defines narrowly as a substantial risk of death, serious permanent disfigurement, or protracted loss of the function of a body part or organ. A broken nose, stitches, or a bad bruise do not automatically meet that. Where they do not, the correct charge is simple assault, which is a misdemeanor. Charges written high on thin injury evidence are common, and the medical records rather than the affidavit are what settle it.
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding in these cases. Once the Commonwealth has charged the offense, the decision to continue belongs to the district attorney. A complainant can say they no longer wish to proceed, and prosecutors do take that into account, but it is not their call to make and cases regularly go forward without their cooperation. What that means practically is that waiting for the charge to disappear is not a strategy, and the weeks people spend doing exactly that are the weeks in which something could have been done.
Yes, though which kind depends on the subsection. Physical contact, following someone, or a course of conduct with no legitimate purpose are summary offenses, which sit at the bottom of the criminal scale but still produce a record. Lewd or threatening communications, repeated anonymous contact, and repeated contact at unreasonable hours are third-degree misdemeanors. That distinction is worth caring about, because a summary offense becomes expungeable after five arrest-free years and a misdemeanor conviction does not become expungeable at all.
Where these offenses land on the scale depends on the injury, the intent, and who started what, none of which is settled by the affidavit. Where a domestic allegation is involved, the consequences reach further than the case itself. Ethan Stone leads the firm’s criminal work, and the first conversation costs nothing.