Free Republic

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) on Friday offered a warning to individuals who may try to act as uncertified poll watchers in the state during next week's elections. “I’ve got a jail cell, and I’ve got criminal charges and you can stand in front of a Philadelphia jury — which, by the way, is a diverse jury — and you can explain why you thought it was OK to come to Philly and steal our votes,” Krasner said during an interview on CNN. “This is the birthplace of democracy. We’re not doing this," Krasner added. "Wannabe fascists stay home,...

U.S. Attorney William McSwain of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania blames Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for the rise in violence in the City of Brotherly Love. Krasner’s policies, McSwain announced, “create a culture of lawlessness; they leave criminals emboldened; and they have inevitable consequences.” Indeed, since Krasner took office in 2018, homicides are up 49 percent and shootings have climbed by 59 percent. If the trend holds, Philadelphia will tally more than 450 homicides in 2020—the highest count in nearly 30 years. Crime is spiking precisely because Krasner isn’t holding serious offenders accountable. An analysis by my group, the...

Billionaire Democratic donor George Soros bankrolled the successful campaigns of a new crop of district attorneys who now preside over big cities with skyrocketing crime and frayed relationships with police departments. Soros-backed DAs in Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco and other cities have fired scores of experienced prosecutors and, as promised, stopped prosecuting low-level quality-of-life crimes such as disorderly conduct, vagrancy and loitering. Their laissez-faire criminal justice philosophy bucks the get-tough “broken windows” approach, made famous by then-New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, which targets minor offenses to cut off the criminal element in the bud. Put into practice, New...

Ori Feibush remembers everything about the night an arsonist destroyed 11 townhouses he’d been developing in Philadelphia’s Point Breeze neighborhood. He was awakened by a neighbor banging on his door. He sprinted about two blocks from his home to the site, but firefighters wouldn’t let him near the blaze. “I was unfortunately standing as a bystander,” he said, “with all of my neighbors watching a project that I had worked on for half a decade burn to the ground.” Mr. Feibush, 36, says he personally lost more than $1 million in the May 2017 fire, and his investors also took...

**SNIP** The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office says since late May, more than 550 burglary and looting arrests have been made. “We intend to vigorously prosecute,” District Attorney Larry Krasner said. “Some of these burglaries, at the most extreme end, involve things like burglarizing a gun shop and trying to go out the front with enormous quantities of guns. Some of them, on the other hand, are an 18-year-old who’s never had contact with the criminal justice system before, not even an arrest, who’s going in through a broken window and coming out with a T-shirt. “So we need to look...

... Just last June, Philadelphia magazine published a blistering condemnation of what it referred to as Krasner’s failed “social experiment.” In a piece titled "The disastrous consequences of DA Larry Krasner’s ‘reforms,’" James D. Schultz assiduously chronicled Krasner’s favored liberal policies and the disastrous effects they were wreaking on public safety in Philadelphia. Schultz points out how gun-related crimes in Krasner’s district spiked and the city’s police force became demoralized by the attorney’s catch-and-release tactics. Krasner’s preferred method for gun arrests is a foolhardy and dangerous court diversionary program known as Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition. Even first-year criminal justice undergraduates comprehend...

In 1981, Philadelphia Police Officer Danny Faulkner was murdered by Mumia Abu-Jamal.[1] A racially diverse jury convicted Jamal of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death. Since then, he has pursued endless appeals in state and federal courts. Although his death sentence was overturned on a technicality, his conviction has been repeatedly affirmed. Throughout this lengthy process, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was zealously represented by three previous district attorneys. But now the defense of Abu-Jamal’s conviction is in the hands of District Attorney Larry Krasner, the self-styled “public defender with power,” who during his short time in office has established...

Michael White didn’t deny killing Sean Schellenger. He admitted to police and at his trial that he plunged a knife several times into Schellenger’s back during a July 2018 scuffle in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. Numerous witnesses and a cellphone video confirmed what happened. Yet in October 2019 a jury acquitted Mr. White, a 22-year-old college student, of voluntary manslaughter. Many, including the victim’s family, blame Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s soft-on-crime district attorney. Mr. Krasner is one of a new crop of “progressive prosecutors” who have won election in liberal cities. They include San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Weather...

In his first week on the job, he fired 31 prosecutors from the DA’s office because they weren’t committed to the changes he intended to make. “Change is never easy, but DA Krasner was given a clear mandate from the voters for transformational change,” his spokesperson said at the time. “Today’s actions are necessary to achieve that agenda.” Next, Krasner obeyed a court order to release a list of 29 officers from the Philadelphia Police Department that were on a “do-not-call list” — meaning that they were so tainted that they would be considered unreliable as witnesses. The police officers...

Philadelphia’s top prosecutor said Wednesday his office will stop jailing people who cannot afford to pay cash bail in minor criminal cases, affirming the commitment of the country’s fifth-largest city to a national movement that argues the practice targets poor Americans. District Attorney Larry Krasner said his decision to instruct city prosecutors not to seek a bail payment in a number of misdemeanor and non-violent felony crimes will correct a criminal justice system that discriminates against African-Americans, Latinos and poor people. “There is absolutely no reason why someone who will show up for court, is not a risk of flight,...

It is one of the most shocking and drastic shakeups of the District Attorney's Office that anyone can recall. But it most definitely should not come as any surprise to those who had been following the campaign promises of Larry Krasner. The purge was on full display as the file boxes kept rolling out of the D.A.'s office. Thirty-one staffers, including a number of murder squad prosecutors, high ranking deputies and division chiefs were among those terminated.