Two prosecutors said if Philly DA Larry Krasner doesn’t retract ‘untrue’ court filings, they will quit

Two prosecutors involved in a post-conviction case that has roiled District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office sent a letter to Krasner on Monday accusing him of filing court documents that were “filled with misrepresentations aimed transparently and shamefully at harming our reputations.”

In a five-page memo, obtained by The Inquirer, Katherine Ernst and Steven Wildberger said they “vehemently” denied some of the assertions Krasner made in court documents he filed last week with U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond.

Those assertions, said Ernst and Wildberger — some of which they said included inaccurate accounts of their actions — were the culmination of what they called “repeated retaliation” from Krasner over how they have handled the matter in recent months.

And they said Krasner’s behavior toward them had “made it impossible for us to continue” working for him and his office.

» READ MORE: A timeline of how a routine case devolved into controversy in the Philly DA's Office

Still, they stopped short of immediately resigning. Instead, they said, they would allow Krasner until the end of Tuesday to correct what they called the “misrepresentations” in his filings with Diamond. If he didn’t, they said, they would resign.

“Any reasonable person with any self-respect would feel compelled to resign when their employer has made such misrepresentations about them in a federal filing,” they wrote.

Krasner said he could not comment on the situation publicly, as the underlying case remains pending.

In a response he e-mailed to Ernst, Wildberger, and several others, however — which was also obtained by The Inquirer — Krasner said the documents he filed were accurate, and that Ernst and Wildberger had displayed “patterns of inappropriate behavior” throughout the case.

“I have shown great restraint in not taking action within the office against your insubordination, your legally incorrect and unexamined positions, your factually misleading representations, and the damage they have caused your co-workers and the office,” he wrote. “Despite my restraint, you now falsely claim that your decision to quit the office is somehow a termination for reasons that are also obviously self-serving.”

Ernst and Wildberger declined to comment.

Their memo served as the latest development in a saga that has already caused a variety of issues for Krasner and his office.

Last month, Diamond, in a highly unusual memo of his own, said Krasner and one of his top supervisors, Matthew Stiegler, may have committed crimes including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, or perjury while participating in the underlying case — a complex matter in which a man is seeking to have his murder conviction overturned.

Diamond also said he had referred the situation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for a potential criminal investigation into Krasner, Stiegler, or others in the office.

Not long after Diamond made that statement, Stiegler stepped down from his supervisory position, although he remains employed in the office’s conviction integrity unit.

Ernst, meanwhile, had already stepped back from her role leading the law division for unrelated reasons. And Wildberger gave up his supervisory role in the same unit this summer, which he said was because he had “lost faith in the administration of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.”

In their memo, Ernst and Wildberger took issue with several statements Krasner made about them in court documents he filed last week.

The filings were extensive and concerned more than just the conduct of Ernst and Wildberger. Krasner also took aim at Diamond, saying any suggestions that he or Stiegler committed crimes were “baseless” and that the judge should be removed from the case.

Still, in providing his version of events, Krasner recounted instances in which he interacted with — and often disagreed with — Ernst and Wildberger. And some of his recollections, Ernst and Wildberger wrote, included “egregious misrepresentations” about what they said unfolded.

In one instance, they said, Krasner inaccurately recounted a plan Stiegler had proposed about how to proceed with part of the case.

In Krasner’s telling, when Stiegler found out that another prosecutor, Jaclyn Mason, had filed a brief filled with errors, Stiegler proposed a “sweeping ‘sentinel review’” to see if Mason had done the same thing in other cases.

Krasner viewed that proposal as reasonable, saying in the court filings he thought it could “get to the truth” about what happened. But Ernst and Wildberger disagreed. And Krasner said he believed their opposition stemmed from “fear” that if Mason had made other mistakes, those errors could be held against Ernst and Wildberger, who supervised her.

But Ernst and Wildberger, in their memo, challenged his account and said Krasner’s sole goal in entertaining the plan was a “transparent effort” to improperly scapegoat Mason and absolve Stiegler.

“We heard your words, and we saw your demeanor,” they wrote. “You were not trying to get to the truth; you simply wanted to deflect blame from Stiegler.”

The memo also said Krasner “grossly misrepresents” a conversation he had with Ernst after she became supervisor of the Law Division. Ernst took over shortly after two of its prior supervisors, Paul George and Nancy Winkelman, were disbarred and suspended, respectively, over their conduct in a separate federal matter.

According to Krasner’s filing, Ernst asked for a raise, in part, because she feared similar scrutiny, and said “she could need higher compensation to ‘hire a lawyer’ to ‘defend’ her against unjust targeting.”

But Ernst and Wildberger’s memo disputed that.

Ernst requested the raise, they said, because in taking over the unit, she was “facing a nearly insurmountable task: to clean up the mess her predecessors had left behind.” She was working up to 70 hours per week and supervising nearly 100 people while making “significantly less” money than her predecessor, they said.

Krasner’s account sought to harm Ernst’s reputation, they said, and cast her “as a panicked, irrational woman terrified of Judge Diamond.”

The letter also took issue with Krasner characterizing their decisions to speak out on the matter as being “driven by fear.”

“We were driven simply by a desire to do the right thing and fulfill our ethical obligations and duty of candor to the court,” they wrote.

In closing, they accused Krasner of saying that the prosecutors who work for him are “human shields,” and saying that “judges can’t get to you because you don’t sign any filings.”

“But the ADAs of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office are not your shields; we are people,” they wrote.

And they said if he did not “correct the misrepresentations” in his filings by Tuesday, “you will have constructively terminated us.”