Judges hate it when people lie to them, and when they do it over and over again, they start to get pissed. And the office of Soros-backed Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner seems to be lying to them an awful lot.
Most of the mainstream media isn’t spending much effort to cover the slow-rolling collapse of Soros-prosecutor District Attorney Larry Krasner.
At least I HOPE it will be a collapse, as judges turn on Krasner not so much for his soft-on-crime policies, about which they can do little directly, but for his office’s illegal tactics used to help convicted murderers get out of jail.
I wrote about decision #1 yesterday, in which the Democrat-dominated Pennsylvania Supreme Court blasted Krasner’s office for lying to the courts about deficiencies in trials for convicted murderers, conceding—falsely—that prior D.A.’s had committed errors (or worse) in pursuing convictions of murderers.
By doing so, they gave what amounted to get-out-of-jail tickets to murderers. With convictions vacated, Krasner’s office did not give up the right to retry the cases, but it’s pretty hard to expect that an office that committed what amounted to perjury to help convicts overturn their convictions would then pursue the subsequent cases with vigor. At best, they purposely helped the defense and endangered cases that were won; at worst, they decided to just let guilty people go free.
The Supreme Court was not amused, and essentially defanged Krasner’s office, allowing the Attorney General of Pennsylvania to intervene in cases as required.
In a forceful and scolding opinion, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office misled the courts, “violated its duty of candor,” and submitted false statements when asking a judge to vacate a 2004 murder conviction.
In the opinion released Tuesday, Justice Kevin Dougherty wrote that prosecutors’ pattern of misleading judges in seeking to overturn murder convictions is so troubling and recurrent that, going forward, before Krasner’s office seeks such relief, judges must notify the state attorney general’s office and allow it to review the case.
The decision amounted to one of the most scathing rebukes yet of Krasner’s efforts to revisit decades-old convictions, and arrives amid intensifying scrutiny of the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit and appeals division, whose handling of post-conviction cases has drawn criticism from judges in both state and federal court.
Just last week, Krasner’s office reversed course in a separate murder case, writing in a federal court filing that one of its prosecutors had made “material misstatements” and submitted “legally erroneous” statements when seeking to overturn a man’s murder conviction. The office sought to withdraw its recommendation to grant the defendant a new trial.
This decision is, as far as I can tell, one of the most scathing rebukes of a District Attorney in memory. It’s pretty shocking, actually. The Justices spared no mercy to Krasner and company, and with good reason.
Snip.
Now comes round two: a federal court just sanctioned one of Krasner’s former attorneys who was in charge of this program, barring her for three years from cases before the court.
Nancy Winkelman was suspended for three years by a panel of federal judges who found that she was complicit in efforts to mislead a federal judge while seeking to overturn the death sentence of a man convicted of killing an East Mount Airy couple in the 1980s and allow him to serve life in prison instead.
The ruling, made public this week, adds to the mounting judicial scrutiny of post-conviction work in Krasner’s office. On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court imposed remarkable new restrictions on prosecutors’ efforts to reverse potentially problematic convictions.
In a forceful and scolding opinion, the high court said Krasner’s office misled judges, submitted false statements, and “violated its duty of candor” in asking a judge to vacate a 2004 murder conviction.
The court wrote that prosecutors’ actions in the case were part of a troubling pattern of conduct in seeking to overturn murder convictions and ordered that, going forward, the state attorney general’s office must be asked to review and weigh in on all such cases.
The panel of federal judges, in ordering Winkelman’s suspension, echoed some of those concerns.
Nor did the viciousness of the murders in question prevent Krasner’s office from lying to get said murderers sprung.
The three-judge panel, in a ruling issued in March and unsealed this week, said Winkelman and a subordinate, former assistant district attorney Paul George, misled a federal judge by misrepresenting parts of the case while attempting to reverse the death sentence of Robert Wharton.
Wharton was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for the 1984 strangulation and drowning deaths of Bradley and Ferne Hart inside their East Mount Airy home.
The jury found that Wharton, angry over a disputed debt, spent months terrorizing the family before he forced his way inside the home at knifepoint and killed the couple. Afterward, he turned off the heat, leaving the couple’s seven-month-old baby, Lisa, to freeze to death — but she survived.
Decades later, prosecutors in Krasner’s office, in seeking to vacate his death sentence, suggested in court that the victims’ family backed their effort. But it was later discovered that they had consulted only one relative and never contacted Lisa Hart-Newman, the couple’s surviving daughter, who strongly opposed the move.
George later acknowledged that was a mistake, and U.S. District Judge Mitchell Goldberg ordered Krasner to write apology letters to the Harts’ relatives.
Goldberg, who denied the request to reduce Wharton’s sentence, later said George’s and Winkelman’s review of the case was “patently deficient,” and that they violated federal rules of procedure in a manner that was “egregious” and “exceptional.”
The two prosecutors then faced federal disciplinary proceedings to examine whether they’d been intentionally deceptive.
Last year, the three-judge panel found that George had lied to Goldberg about key facts, “flouted the interests of the public and the victims’ families,” and acted as the “quarterback” of efforts by the district attorney’s office to undo or undermine all death penalty cases.
Is it possible to have them tried for perjury? I am not a lawyer, so I am unclear whether lying in documents to the court count the same as perjury under oath.
Apparently, among the “needed reforms” Krasner refers to, letting convicted murderers escape punishment by lying to courts is on the top of the list.
Two courts so far have made clear that Krasner’s office is not only pursuing bad policies, which could be “justified” by the fact that Krasner was elected, but also willing to break the law to do so in the name of “reform.”
Given that Krasner got some 75% of the vote the last time he was elected, it seems that ordinary Philadelphians are either ignorant of his love of criminals and mindlessly pull the D lever, or are aware of them and side with the criminals as well…
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)