Philadelphia’s District Attorney reinvents the role of the modern prosecutor.
Until Larry Krasner entered the race for District Attorney of
Philadelphia last year, he had never prosecuted a case. He began his
career as a public defender, and spent three decades as a defense
attorney. In the legal world, there is an image, however cartoonish, of
prosecutors as conservative and unsparing, and of defense attorneys as
righteous and perpetually outraged. Krasner, who had a long ponytail
until he was forty, seemed to fit the mold. As he and his colleagues
engaged in daily combat with the D.A.’s office, they routinely
complained about prosecutors who, they believed, withheld evidence that
they were legally required to give to the defense; about police who lied
under oath on the witness stand; and about the D.A. Lynne Abraham, a
Democrat whose successful prosecutions, over nearly twenty years, sent
more people to death row than those of any other D.A. in modern
Philadelphia history.
In 1993, Krasner opened his own law firm,
and went on to file more than seventy-five lawsuits against the police,
alleging brutality and misconduct. In 2013, he represented Askia Sabur,
who had been charged with robbing and assaulting a police officer. A
cell-phone video of the incident, which had gone viral, showed that it
was the police who had beaten Sabur, on a West Philadelphia sidewalk.
Daniel Denvir, a former criminal-justice reporter at the Philadelphia City Paper
and a friend of Krasner’s, recalled that, at the trial, Krasner
revealed the unreliability of the officers’ testimony, “methodically
unspooling their lies in front of the jury.” In dealing with such cases,
Denvir said, Krasner sought to illustrate “prosecutors’ and judges’
typical credulity with regard to anything that a police officer said, no
matter how improbable.” (Krasner later filed a civil lawsuit on Sabur’s
behalf, which was settled for eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The police officers were never charged with lying on the witness
stand.)
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Source: The New Yorker
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