Larry Krasner, Philadelphia's Combative D.A., Faces Judicial Blowback

Two blistering court opinions have put Mr. Krasner, a prominent progressive district attorney, in what may be the most precarious position of his public career.

For nearly a decade, Larry Krasner, the most prominent of a national cohort of progressive district attorneys, has been gut-renovating the criminal justice system in Philadelphia.

He has stopped criminal prosecutions for an array of low-level offenses, aggressively pursued charges against police officers and pushed for judges to vacate scores of past convictions he believes were unjust, all while scrapping with officials from the White House on down. Last November, he won a third term by a more than 3-to-1 margin.

Between that election and the fact that violent crime in the city is at historic lows, Mr. Krasner's power should be at its zenith. But in two blistering opinions this summer, state and federal judges have put Mr. Krasner, 65, in what may be the most precarious position of his public career.

In June, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that Mr. Krasner's office had withheld evidence and misstated facts in pushing to vacate a 2004 murder conviction. The court ruled that moving forward, the state attorney general's office -- which Mr. Krasner has described as the province of "Nazis," according to members of his own staff who testified about him in court this summer -- could weigh in when the D.A.'s office found that past convictions were unjust.

And in September, in an order based largely on the testimony of the district attorney's own staff, a federal judge asked the local U.S. attorney to investigate Mr. Krasner and one of his top prosecutors for possible criminal obstruction of justice and conspiracy.

"If what they say is true," the judge, Paul S. Diamond, said after hearing from multiple assistant district attorneys, "potential wrongdoing abounds."

The U.S. attorney's office has not commented on the judge's order, and it remains unclear whether or when the district attorney's office will be investigated. A spokesman for Mr. Krasner declined to comment.

Mr. Krasner, a former criminal defense lawyer, has been characteristically defiant. He condemned the June State Supreme Court decision as undermining democracy, and, in a series of filings this week, he insisted that the federal case be transferred to "a judge who does not appear biased or prejudiced." Calling the allegations against him "Orwellian," he also said they would put him among the ranks of those who have been "willfully terrorized by bogus investigations and prosecutions to benefit Trump."

In the past, such defiance has paid off for Mr. Krasner, who has survived an attempted impeachment and multiple challenges at the ballot box. Other progressive prosecutors around the country lost or were recalled as voters turned against efforts to roll back incarceration at a time of elevated crime rates. But there are few signs so far of discontent among the working-class Black voters who make up Mr. Krasner's loyal base.

"My community's overwhelmingly behind him," said Carl Day, a preacher and activist, who praised the district attorney's efforts against street gangs as well as police brutality.

But some in the legal community, including those who share Mr. Krasner's goals, fear that the judicial blowback is the inevitable outcome of his pugnacious, one-man-against-the-world approach. While Mr. Krasner relishes combat with officials outside the office, there has been incessant turnover within, several former members of his staff said, bleeding the office of institutional knowledge and alienating potential allies.

"You've got to cross all your t's and dot your i's when you're doing very controversial work," said Keir Bradford-Grey, the city's former chief public defender. "When you're doing good stuff and you're going to piss a lot of powerful people off, you'd better know that they are going to confront you. You'd better make sure that you're doing this stuff so that it can never be questioned and that the legacy of it lives on -- and that you don't cut it off because of your own carelessness."

The case in federal court arose from the murder conviction of a man named Dennis Johnson, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2009. For years, Mr. Johnson sought to revisit his conviction, and in 2022, the district attorney's office filed a motion agreeing that he should be retried or released.

But when Judge Diamond ordered a hearing on the matter this May, supervisors in the district attorney's office reviewed the 2022 motion and found significant flaws. The office withdrew the motion, but an internal dispute broke out about who would shoulder the blame.

Jaclyn Mason, the prosecutor who had signed the motion, was an experienced lawyer but had been at the district attorney's office for only four months when she was given the case by Matthew Steigler, who supervises the unit that reviews past convictions.

"I just was the conduit for drafting this," she testified before Judge Diamond in July. Mr. Steigler had assured her, she said, that defense lawyers had found Mr. Johnson's claims worthy.

Mr. Steigler told the judge that he had assumed Ms. Mason had investigated the case. But over three days of testimony, four other assistant district attorneys said that Mr. Steigler had crafted a plan to blame the flawed filing on Ms. Mason as a "rogue actor," even suggesting they look through her past filings for mistakes to highlight.

The four prosecutors said that Mr. Krasner had agreed with this plan, calling it a "really good idea" and insisting that the priority was to "protect the office." They said he was determined to head off interference from the state attorney general's office, with which he has frequently clashed.

Mr. Krasner warned there would be "consequences" for anyone who alerted the judge about the internal conflicts around the case, his employees testified. Much of what they described struck Judge Diamond as veering into criminal behavior. An appointee of George W. Bush, the judge had stunned the city's legal establishment in 2017, when he ordered the previous district attorney handcuffed and jailed after the man pleaded guilty in a bribery trial.

In the response he filed in court this week, Mr. Krasner suggested that the judge was inferring conspiracy where there was none. He said that he had simply sought a review of Ms. Mason's cases to ensure there were no other problems, and that he was right to warn his employees about filing notices in court that he had not authorized.

He insisted that the four prosecutors who testified were acting out of a "pervasive fear" in the office "of being unfairly targeted" by federal courts for their work on exoneration cases, alluding to the disbarment and suspension of two prosecutors for their "misleading and dishonest" actions in an earlier case.

Judges have blasted Mr. Krasner's office for how readily -- and at times negligently, they charge -- it has sought to revisit or overturn past convictions, having done so in more than 100 cases so far. The State Supreme Court accused the office of acting not on the facts but out of "personal, political, ideological, policy or other nonlegal reasons."

State Representative Martina White, a Republican from Philadelphia and a leader of the 2022 attempt to impeach Mr. Krasner, said the judicial orders were long in coming. "Krasner has an agenda," she said. "He's willing to do whatever tasks without regard for the public interest and without regard for his job and his duty."

To Mr. Krasner's defenders, the criticism reflects a system resistant to badly needed reform. Frank Rizzo, the police-commissioner-turned-mayor whose approach to criminal justice in the 1960s and '70s was summed up as "break their heads," left a long shadow in Philadelphia, as did Lynne Abraham, the chief prosecutor in the 1990s and 2000s, nicknamed "the deadliest D.A." for how eagerly she pursued capital sentences.

"You've got to think about all those people they were throwing away in the '80s and '90s," said Jonathan Wilson, who runs a nonprofit in West Philadelphia that steers young men away from violence. "The people he's against, they want to lock people up and throw away the key."

People who have worked for Mr. Krasner see it as more complicated. While they concede that Mr. Krasner has the inclinations of a defender, with exonerations more prized within his office than convictions, several said in interviews that management, more than ideology, was the source of many of the office's troubles.

With so much turnover, daunting responsibilities were placed on people with little prosecutorial experience, several former prosecutors said, which meant there were fewer lawyers in a position to push back. "There was not a lot of room for dissent in the office," said Christopher Lynett, who was an assistant district attorney in the office until 2020.

But these problems ultimately undermine Mr. Krasner's mission, said Mr. Lynett, who recently represented the families of the murder victims in the conviction case before the State Supreme Court. With the office so dominated by one man, he said, important reforms could simply be rolled back after that man is gone. Already there are murmurs that lawyers with more hard-line prosecutorial instincts are maneuvering to succeed Mr. Krasner.

Still, Mr. Lynett said the district attorney was not the type to fret about scoldings, or even the possibility of criminal charges.

"Larry would love to get indicted," he said.