Philadelphia’s recalcitrant District Attorney Larry Krasner is back in the news this week, thanks to an extraordinary ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Invoking what’s known as “King’s bench jurisdiction”—which allows the state’s high court to assume jurisdiction over a case at any stage when it involves a matter of extraordinary public importance—the justices reversed a lower court decision to grant a new trial to a convicted murderer under the state’s Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). The high court held that the record did not support a new trial, despite Krasner’s office conceding in the courtroom that the defendant was entitled to such relief.
Courts generally defer to such concessions by a prosecutor’s office, so it is striking that Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court would disregard that concession and overturn the granting of a new trial. But the decision makes perfect sense.
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For starters, Krasner’s office has a curious habit of conceding relief, according to the court. This matters, because when the prosecution concedes relief, the reviewing court loses out on the benefits that stem from zealous advocacy in an adversarial process.
Prosecutorial concessions can also shield important evidence from judicial consideration—and that may very well be the point for Krasner. The court stated that the DA’s concession wasn’t just wrong in the case at hand, but that it was “not reliable.”
Even the most brilliant lawyers can make legal errors, but the court’s findings suggest that Krasner’s concessions—even the unwarranted ones—are not the result of mistakes. In a scathing opinion, the court found that Krasner’s office “violated its duty of candor to the PCRA court, 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” (emphasis mine).
So “numerous” are these “instances of untrustworthy concessions, lack of candor, misrepresentations of fact, lack of adequate investigation, and avoidance of hearings” that the court also ruled that in future cases in which Krasner’s office concedes relief, the reviewing court “shall grant the Office of Attorney General (OAG) notice and the right to intervene in the case before ruling on the concession.”
Readers may be wondering why a prosecutor would go this far out of his way to help a convicted murderer. The most plausible answer: ideology. Larry Krasner subscribes (sincerely, one suspects) to a “social justice” view that elevates the concerns of perpetrators over those of victims. He comes from a school of thought that sees the enforcement mechanisms of the criminal justice system as inherently oppressive and reflective of society’s failures to prevent lawbreaking by making society more equitable.
Earlier this week, New York City congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier articulated this social justice view during a debate hosted by NY1. Per Chevalier, government should spend public money on solutions “that actually bring real safety to our communities” rather than policing and incarceration. What kind of solutions? “[F]unding the programs that are actually correlated with an increased sense of safety,” she said, without (naturally) specifying any.
In a video released in response to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision, Krasner was defiant. Accusing the court of acting out of fear of “reform,” he likened his critics to opponents of Martin Luther King Jr., whose portrait Krasner stood in front of while delivering his response. The DA went on to take credit for the recent reductions in Philadelphia homicides, without providing a shred of evidence to support that suggestion.
Here’s the truth that people like Krasner and Chevalier are afraid the public will learn: policing, prosecution, and incarceration are unmatched in terms of their proven (by rigorous empirical evidence) ability to significantly reduce crime.
The “abolitionists” and “reformers” want you to believe they have somehow derived solutions to problems—like poverty, inequality, predation, greed, and violence—that have been present in every society throughout history. The hubris of this view cannot be overstated. Nor can one overemphasize how thoroughly the evidence disproves it. New York City, for example, saw homicides fall by 87 percent between 1990–2017. Gotham didn’t solve poverty or reduce economic inequality. Nor did it reduce crime through some jobs program. In fact, the city continued to cut homicides during the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate nearly doubled.
Krasner and his comrades may be comfortable abandoning proven approaches to pursue their misguided ideas about justice. The bad news is that, as public officeholders, they’re in an excellent position to do that. The good news is that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court just took an important step to check their ideologically motivated folly. Here’s hoping the rest of the country takes notice.