Larry Krasner’s exoneration push faces a reckoning
A state Supreme Court rebuke and testimony from a former prosecutor in his office are raising hard questions about how zealously the city’s top prosecutor works to overturn convictions.
No one should have to spend even a single day behind bars for a crime they did not commit. But in his zeal to right legal wrongs, District Attorney Larry Krasner lost the plot.
Since first getting elected in November 2017, Krasner, a former defense and civil rights attorney, has pushed for scores of exonerations for people convicted mainly of murder. But, it turns out, most are not exonerations in which the convict’s innocence is proven through incontrovertible evidence, such as DNA.
Instead, the DA’s office often sides with defense attorneys who claim some sort of procedural error, such as withheld evidence or inadequate defense counsel. In most of these cases, there isn’t a court hearing in which the new findings get presented, and witnesses testify under oath. Instead, the prosecutors offer what is known as a concession, which often results in dropping the charges and letting the person go free.
But state and federal courts are starting to challenge Krasner’s tactics.
In June, the state Supreme Court rebuked the DA’s handling of a case in which it was seeking to vacate a 2004 murder conviction of Laver Brown, who was convicted of second-degree murder and robbery following the shooting death of Michael Richardson, a Rite Aid worker at a North Philadelphia store.
In July, former Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Mason testified in federal court that Krasner’s office did not investigate the appeal of another convicted murderer and instead relied on the claims of his defense attorneys — and then encouraged her to lie about the lack of independent verification. Instead of going along with the scheme, Mason said, she quit.
That hearing before U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond was continued to Aug. 27, where more damning testimony may come.
The state Supreme Court has already seen enough. The court ordered the state attorney general to be allowed to review future cases in which Krasner’s office is seeking to overturn a conviction.
“What we have seen in this case and too many others is the opposite of justice,” Justice Kevin Dougherty wrote in the scathing 109-page opinion.
The high court found Krasner’s office misled the courts and submitted false statements when asking a lower-court judge to vacate Brown’s life sentence.
After his conviction, Brown’s attorneys said some earlier witness statements were not provided to his trial lawyer, which violated his right to a fair trial. Krasner’s office agreed and argued that the case file revealed a “pattern of prosecutorial misconduct” and requested Brown receive a new trial.
But lawyers for the families of Richardson and a second man Brown was convicted of killing in a separate incident asked the state Supreme Court to intervene.
Lawyers for the victims’ families argued that Krasner had a conflict of interest because two of his former law partners had been involved in Brown’s case.
The high court ordered a hearing that shed a harsh light on the conduct of Krasner’s prosecutors.
“We find the [district attorney’s office] … violated its duty of candor to the [Post Conviction Relief Act] court, withheld material evidence from the court, opposed efforts by [the victims’ families] 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,” Dougherty wrote.
Whoa. What the heck is going on?
The Supreme Court also found the prosecutors filed a joint document with Brown’s attorneys that “was false in multiple respects.”
The court rejected claims by the DA’s office that it conducted a thorough review of the record in the case. Instead, the court said prosecutors “cut corners” and failed to interview a single witness or any of the original investigators involved in the case.
The DA’s handling of Brown’s case is troubling enough. But it turns out this was not a one-off blunder. The Supreme Court found the case fit a disturbing pattern.
“There have been numerous instances of untrustworthy concessions, lack of candor, misrepresentations of fact, lack of adequate investigation, and avoidance of hearings,” the opinion said.
The Supreme Court went on to highlight problems with the DA’s handling of 10 additional cases, and said there may be many more.
One case involved efforts by Krasner’s office to overturn the death sentence of Robert Wharton, who was convicted in the 1984 strangulation and drowning deaths of a couple in their East Mount Airy home, leaving their then-7-month-old child alone. She survived.
The case eventually ended up before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. In a unanimous decision, the panel found that Krasner’s office misled the court and “slant[ed] the facts” surrounding Wharton’s case before a lower federal court in 2019 in an attempt to vacate the death penalty and instead let Wharton remain in prison for life.
Again, with the lack of candor.
U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg denied the request and imposed penalties that required Krasner to write a letter of apology to the family of Wharton’s victims, which the appellate panel found were both “mild and fitting.”
“Courts rely on lawyers’ honesty; lawyers may not mislead them,” Circuit Judge Stefanos Bibas wrote in the panel’s March 2024 opinion. “But the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office did just that.”
Back to the state Supreme Court.
After highlighting problems with the Brown case and 10 others, the court wrote, “These cases, and the present one, likely represent only a fraction of the [district attorney’s] problematic concessions since January of 2018.”
The court said many of the DA’s concessions did not include hearings in which sworn testimony from both sides is presented, which the court wrote “is generally the best means to expose problems and ensure a reliable and just outcome.”
For his part, Krasner was unrepentant. He issued a video statement following the Supreme Court opinion that leaned on his electoral victories to claim the ruling “undermines the value of a vote in Philadelphia as compared to every other county.”
Krasner added that social justice efforts like his often face a familiar pattern of resistance: “First they ignore you — we’re past it. Then they laugh at you — we’re past that. Then they fight you — and we have been fighting for 8½ years.”
The district attorney’s website trumpets 59 “exonerations” by the Conviction Integrity Unit created by Krasner. But the National Registry of Exonerations said the total number of exonerations by the DA’s office during Krasner’s tenure is 75 — an extraordinary number given that reversing a conviction faces a high bar and often takes years.
Nearly all of those set free have been Black men, underscoring how the legal system is often stacked against people of color. At the same time, no new charges have been brought in those cases, leaving killers and other wrongdoers walking the streets.
There is no denying systemic racism exists across our legal system, including in Philadelphia. I witnessed abuses and failures of cops, prosecutors, lousy defense attorneys, eyewitness misidentifications, and forced confessions up close as a reporter covering the courts years ago for the Wall Street Journal.
I wrote a story about a Latino man who was convicted of murder in the Bronx, N.Y., despite having a solid alibi: On the night of the murder, he was in prison in the Dominican Republic.
That’s all to say wrongful convictions happen, and sending someone to prison for a crime they didn’t commit — or worse, putting them to death — is the most heinous abuse of the legal system imaginable.
That’s why I welcomed Krasner’s efforts to review cases in which misconduct or errors may have occurred.
But the sloppy work by Krasner’s office has undermined his theory of the case. Sadly, those who have been truly wrongfully convicted will be the ones to suffer because judges will no longer trust the DA’s office.
When judges in state and federal courts and former prosecutors in Krasner’s own office are citing similar patterns of corner-cutting and lying, there is a serious problem.
Krasner built his career on demanding accountability from the system. He owes Philadelphians no less from his own office.
