AP Photo/Matt Rourke District Attorney Larry Krasner is something of a bargain for Philadelphia. According to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he has not only been serving as the city’s prosecutor but effectively as its top public defender.
Krasner’s record is the subject of a scathing new opinion, which accuses him of leading a dishonest effort to undermine major criminal cases to engineer new trials for defendants.
Krasner has long cultivated a reputation as the champion of the left. We were both liberal students in the same class at the University of Chicago. While I moved to the political center, Krasner moved even more dramatically to the far left. Funded by George Soros as part of his campaign to elect social justice warriors as prosecutors, Krasner has used his office to threaten to arrest FBI agents and to “hunt down” ICE officers, to the delight of the far left.
The chest-pounding has not resulted in any such roundups, but the press remains good for Krasner in cultivating his image as the avenging angel of the perpetually enraged.
That is why the recent opinion from Pennsylvania’s Democratic-controlled Supreme Court was so surprising. It appears that even these liberal justices have had enough.
In Commonwealth v. Brown, Justice Kevin Dougherty (joined by Justices Sallie Updyke Mundy, Kevin Brobson, and Daniel McCaffery) denounced Krasner and his office for a pattern of misleading and mendacious filings to undermine the criminal cases of murderers and other convicts.
These defendants filed for relief under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act. The Act allowed for an adversarial process to determine whether defendants should receive new trials. However, the district attorney’s office routinely abandoned the field, leaving defendants essentially unopposed in their demands.
The Supreme Court wrote that such concessions robbed the public of “the benefits of opposing advocacy.”
It went even further in alluding to Krasner’s possible political and ideological motivations in pandering to the far left. “When relief is not dictated by the record and law but merely advocated for personal, political, ideological, policy, or other non-legal reasons, a prosecutor’s concession does not minister justice,” the opinion states. “It facilitates injustice.”
Then came the haymaker — a finding that Krasner’s concession was “not reliable” and that Krasner’s office had “violated its duty of candor,” “withheld material evidence from the court, opposed efforts by amici to gain access to this evidence, submitted a false stipulation of fact, misstated facts in its pleadings, failed to conduct a reasonable investigation, and opposed a required evidentiary hearing.” In this case, the justices wrote, the “predictable result was the erroneous grant of a new trial.”
The justices cited a pattern by which, since 2018, his office has conceded relief in roughly 100 murder cases like the one at issue. It found that his office engaged in “numerous instances of untrustworthy concessions, lack of candor, misrepresentations of fact, lack of adequate investigation, and avoidance of hearings. And the problems are poised to continue.”
The justices were clearly alarmed because there are more than a thousand cases still in the pipeline, and Krasner’s office is expected to continue what they called “its checkered concession program.”
To give you an idea of the cases where Krasner’s office struggled to undo the conviction of murderers, consider the facts of the 1984 case of Robert Wharton. Wharton was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for the 1984 strangulation and drowning deaths of Bradley and Ferne Hart. Wharton was upset about a debt, so he broke into their home, killed the Harts, and then turned off the heat, leaving their seven-month-old baby, Lisa, to freeze to death. The baby miraculously survived.
The court expressly cited Krasner’s prosecutors for making misrepresentations to the court. That included the claim by Krasner’s office that the family of the victims had bizarrely favored undoing the conviction. It was later discovered that Krasner’s staff had consulted only one relative, who was not the couple’s surviving daughter. The daughter, in fact, vehemently and understandably opposed the move. Krasner was ordered to write apology letters to the family.
Ultimately, the actions of Krasner’s office were so outrageous in this case that a panel of judges disbarred his supervisor for repeatedly lying in an effort to overturn the conviction. Krasner’s subordinate, Nancy Winkelman, was also barred from handling cases before the court for three years.
In response, Krasner did what he always does: He suggested that the criticism furthered racism and threatened democracy. He declared that the criticism of his office “undermines the value of a vote in Philadelphia” and defended his staff as merely furthering the work of racial justice: “On the eve of Juneteenth, we should all remember that reform is necessary in every era. And that those who bring needed reform sometimes are made to pay a price.”
This is vintage Krasner. His office was found to be both dishonest and negligent, but the district attorney cites his own misconduct as proof that his office is fighting hard for racial justice.
It did not matter that in 2021 a court admonished Krasner for creating what amounted to an unconstitutional blacklist of police officers whom he would not call as witnesses, even if their testimony was required to convict a criminal.
It did not matter that Krasner was admonished by a state Supreme Court justice in 2022 for abusing the grand jury process in an unhinged effort to charge a police officer with a crime.
Krasner feeds a rage addiction with uncut, pure criminal justice crack. It is a formula that has served him well with the media and the voters. Like Atlanta’s Fani Willis, he actually turns court sanctions into a badge of honor with voters who distrust the police and the criminal justice system.
In fact, the more the courts condemn him, the more he suggests that the criticism is just evidence of a prejudiced, unjust legal system.
None of this comes as a surprise for a candidate who expressly adopted “F— around and find out:” as his 2025 reelection slogan. But courts are finding out a bit too much about how Krasner himself has been … well … messing around with the legal system.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.“
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