Philadelphia’s pro-criminal district attorney has so abused his position that he has been reprimanded by the Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which has appointed the state’s Republican attorney general as his new personal babysitter.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) attempted to grant a new trial to convicted murderer Lavar Brown, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the attempt, saying that his office’s concession of needing a new trial was “not reliable.”
DHS SCOLDS PHILLY DA FOR COMMENTS ABOUT ‘HUNTING DOWN’ ICE OFFICERS
What the state Supreme Court found is that Krasner was lying to the courts, and not just in Brown’s case. As the justices wrote, Krasner’s concession had failed to disclose material evidence, submitted a false stipulation, and opposed a required evidentiary hearing, among other issues. The justices also wrote that, since 2018, Krasner’s office has “conceded relief well over 100 times, mostly in murder cases like this one,” and that there “have been 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 then tasked the state’s Republican attorney general, Dave Sunday, with reviewing future cases in which Krasner sought to have a conviction tossed and intervening if necessary. Krasner whined that the court’s decision “doesn’t help with freedom” because he was trying to change the district attorney’s office from one that had “historically … stood against overturning convictions almost all the time.”
Therein lies the problem. Krasner is officially a district attorney, but he is spiritually a defense attorney (as he was professionally for 30 years prior to his election). Like seemingly all progressive “prosecutors,” Krasner does not believe criminals should be punished for their crimes, and so has oriented his office to focus on releasing criminals, to the point that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court now claims he has lied to the courts repeatedly so he could release criminals such as convicted murderer Lavar Brown.
Again, this is no partisan feud. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a Democratic majority, and the court just gave a Republican official the power to overrule a Democratic elected official in Philadelphia, a blue city, on this issue. It did so because the court found that Krasner was lying to the courts to ensure that these criminals went free. This is an abuse of office that undermines the very nature of the criminal justice system.
This is what progressive “prosecutors” do, though. They infiltrate district attorney offices to turn them into another tool of criminal defense lawyers, stacking the deck in favor of criminals so that, at most, they receive a slap on the wrist for their crimes. Krasner does not care about justice or public safety, but about letting criminals go free because, as is the case with progressive criminal justice reformers, Krasner views criminals as the real victims of the criminal justice system.