Progressive Prosecutors Have a Crime Problem All Their Own

This article is adapted from City Journal’s Substack, where it first appeared.

Earlier this week, a federal judge made a shocking charge: Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney for nearly a decade, may be guilty of “perjury, conspiracy, or obstruction of justice.” Judge Paul Diamond referred Krasner and one of his top deputies, Matthew Stiegler, to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to investigate potential federal crimes.

Krasner is one of the nation’s most high-profile “progressive prosecutors”—the far-left lawyers who won election to address “injustice” in the “criminal legal system.” Remarkably, Krasner is not the first or only such progressive prosecutor to get the unwanted attention of the feds. At least four others have found themselves in the spotlight. Perhaps it’s worth asking: Why do these purported reformers seem to have so little respect for the system they’re trying to run?

Krasner’s alleged misconduct centers around the murder conviction of Dennis Johnson, who had brought a petition seeking the overturn of that conviction before Diamond. In 2022, Krasner’s office—which had previously opposed Johnson’s petition—reversed course, filing a motion in agreement with Johnson. The DA’s office subsequently tried to withdraw that filing after identifying what it called “material misstatements.” But the assistant district attorney who wrote the original motion then claimed to have been pressured into doing so by Stiegler. Her supervisors denied this but told Diamond in testimony that Stiegler and Krasner had pressured them to make the assistant district attorney a scapegoat, telling them to look for other errors in her briefs in order to pin the blame on her.

Stiegler and Krasner, Diamond alleged, were looking to present “a false narrative to the Court”; the judge also called Stiegler “contradictory, evasive, or outright dishonest.” Their acts, Diamond argued, amounted to “obstruction of justice” and “conspiracy”—thus the criminal referral.

It’s not clear if the U.S. Attorney’s office will take up the request (though it seems quite possible). But it’s not the first time Krasner has faced scrutiny for his “conviction integrity” unit, which critics see as a program deliberately designed to allow murderers to walk. He’s already been reprimanded by another federal judge and seen that program constrained by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. The criminal referral would be the next logical step for an office that seems committed to misleading the courts in the name of its theory of justice.

A federal probe into Krasner would add him to a surprisingly long list of fellow progressive prosecutors who have had similar legal troubles.

First is Marilyn Mosby, the former prosecutor of Baltimore, Maryland. Mosby’s progressive bona fides included her attempt to prosecute the police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray and to impose a categorical ban on prosecuting “low-level” offenses. None of that prevented her own run-ins with the law: she was eventually sentenced to 12 months of home confinement after multiple federal prosecutions, including for a charge of mortgage fraud and two counts of perjury.

Then there’s Kim Gardner, formerly the prosecutor in St. Louis, Missouri. Gardner didn’t go to prison because she accepted a “pretrial diversion agreement” for federal charges related to her misuse of public funds. That followed a number of other scandals, including a public reprimand from the Missouri Supreme Court.

Rachael Rollins was Boston’s progressive prosecutor, in which role she announced a list of 15 misdemeanors that she would not prosecute. That approach was good enough to make her the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts under President Joe Biden. But she was forced to resign from that position in 2023 after the Department of Justice’s inspector general said that she “leaked sensitive Justice Department information to a reporter as part of an effort to help an ally in a political campaign—and then lied about it to investigators.” The inspector general referred her to Biden’s Justice Department for prosecution; the DOJ declined to pursue charges, but she had to leave the administration anyway.

Progressive prosecutor Jody Owens was the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi branch before he was elected as the district attorney representing Jackson, Mississippi. Unfortunately, Owens “caught the eye of federal authorities,” according to Mississippi Today, for his willingness to accept bribes to help facilitate construction in downtown Jackson. Owens was eventually indicted on charges of conspiracy, federal program bribery, wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements. He pled guilty to the conspiracy charge, resigned, and was disbarred.

To be fair, we shouldn’t draw too strong of a conclusion from a handful of stories about progressive prosecutors having run-ins with the law. We should avoid the sort of Willie Horton arguments that criminal-justice “reformers” themselves so often make: a few bad apples do not, necessarily, spoil the bunch.

Still, add to this stack of criminal investigations the other soft-on-crime progressive prosecutors thrown out of office—in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere—and the whole project begins to look a bit dubious. Not exactly a shining example of a reform movement.

This is, perhaps, because the central premise of the progressive prosecution movement was flawed from the beginning. Its proponents focused their ire not on criminals but on the system designed to identify, apprehend, and punish those criminals. They often spent more time going after cops than they did pursuing serious, violent, repeat offenders.

That was, one suspects, what was happening in Krasner’s office. The Philadelphia district attorney has seemingly done everything in his power to reduce his office’s impact, acting more like the defense attorney he once was than the prosecutor he is now supposed to be. The alleged cover-up is one thing; the mere fact that he worked so hard to free a convicted murderer suggests a profound disdain for everything his office is ostensibly meant to do.

It’s hard not to see a connection between the flagrant misconduct some of the most prominent progressive prosecutors have engaged in and the movement’s disdain for the criminal law as such. If you think the whole system is crooked, why not be a little crooked yourself?