Category: Crime & Justice

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.

And in December, a panel of federal judges voted to disbar a supervisor in the office’s appellate unit, saying he “lied repeatedly” while seeking to overturn the death sentence of a man who killed a couple inside their East Mount Airy home, then left their infant daughter inside to die.

By giving the state attorney general authority to intervene when Philadelphia prosecutors decline to defend a conviction, the high court added a new layer of oversight to the state’s largest prosecutor’s office — a rare step that reshapes who controls post-conviction litigation in Pennsylvania.

Krasner, in a video statement shared late Tuesday, said the high court’s ruling “undermines the value of a vote in Philadelphia as compared to every other county.”

In the video, which featured images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, Krasner compared the pushback to his criminal justice reform efforts to those of other social justice movements.

“First they ignore you — we’re past it. Then they laugh at you — we’re past that. Then they fight you — and we have been fighting for 8½ years,” he said.

While four justices — Dougherty, Sallie Updyke Mundy, P. Kevin Brobson, and Daniel McCaffery — agreed there are systemic concerns about the district attorney’s office, three — Debra Todd, Christine Donohue, and David Wecht — supported neither that narrative nor the court’s remedy.

Wecht cast the lone full dissent, arguing that the case did not warrant the Supreme Court’s intervention and that the lower courts already have the tools necessary to prevent improper concessions by prosecutors.

The case at the center of the court’s ruling was that of Lavar Brown, who was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the robbery and shooting death of Michael Richardson, a North Philadelphia Rite Aid worker, in 2003.

Brown was later convicted of shooting and killing a second man, Robert Crawford, in 2005, and was sentenced to death — in part because of the first conviction.

In post-conviction court filings, Brown’s attorneys said the prosecution’s case in Richardson’s killing largely relied on the testimony of two witnesses — including one who, in a statement to police, implicated a teenage girl who was incarcerated at the time of the murder. The witness’ earlier statements were never provided to his trial lawyers, the attorneys said, which violated his right to a fair trial.

In 2021, Krasner’s office said Brown should be granted a new trial, arguing his case had been “infected by serious misconduct” by past prosecutors.

When a Common Pleas Court judge later granted Brown a new trial, the families of Richardson and Crawford took the unusual step of asking Pennsylvania’s highest court to intervene.

The families said Krasner had a conflict of interest because two of his former law partners had previously been involved in Brown’s case. They also argued the district attorney’s office was trying to “circumvent” the courts by conceding relief in the Rite Aid killing, which had served as an aggravating factor for his death sentence.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in March 2025. And on Tuesday, six justices agreed that Brown’s conviction should not have been overturned and ordered a new hearing in the case.

Dougherty, in writing the majority opinion, was scathing in his assessments of prosecutors’ conduct.

In a case involving a murder conviction and death sentence, he wrote, the district attorney’s office’s “fidelity to its duty of candor should have been at its zenith. Regrettably, it was anything but.”

The opinion said prosecutors did not disclose a memorandum in which a key witness, Ronald Vann, identified Brown as being involved with the murder, even as they asked Common Pleas Court Judge Glenn Bronson to vacate the conviction.

Instead, the court said, they asserted that the document was irrelevant to Brown’s claims.

Krasner’s office also tried to keep the victim’s families from accessing it.

But the memorandum was “unquestionably relevant” to the case and showed a consistency over time of Vann’s statements, the opinion said. That Krasner’s office would say otherwise “rings hollow and smacks of post hoc rationalization,” the court said.

“The memorandum would have poured salt on the ‘fertile ground’ for impeachment envisioned by the DAO,” the ruling said, adding that withholding the document was a “breach of its duty of candor” to the court.

The high court also said prosecutors filed a joint stipulation with Brown’s attorneys that “was false in multiple respects,” including mischaracterizations of the timeline of witness statements to police.

The justices said prosecutors had not interviewed a single witness or investigator who had handled the case, and rejected their claims that it had conducted a “thorough, independent review of the records in this case.” Krasner’s office, the court said, “cut corners and shirked its duties in conducting its post-conviction ‘investigation.’”

The court reversed Bronson’s order granting Brown a new trial.

To “promote just outcomes” moving forward, the opinion said, the courts handling appeals must notify the attorney general’s office of any case in which Krasner’s office plans to seek relief, and give state prosecutors the opportunity to review it and weigh in on whether the decision is appropriate.

A lawyer for Brown could not be reached for comment. The Pennsylvania Innocence Project, which had filed a brief supporting Brown and the district attorney’s office alongside dozens of other prosecutors’ offices, former judges, and defense attorneys, declined to comment.

Chris Lynett, the lawyer who represented the families of Richardson and Crawford, said the high court’s opinion supported their belief that Brown’s case — like others — had not been scrutinized closely enough by prosecutors.

“We can’t just say that if we feel uncomfortable with a conviction that we are going to overturn it,” he said. “You need a full record, you need honesty, and you need an evaluation.”

Lynett, who worked as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia for five years before leaving the office in 2020, said its leadership needs to “think about what they’re doing and what they’re encouraging their line prosecutors to do in court.”

The attorney general’s office had filed an amicus brief in support of the families, arguing that, since 2018, Krasner’s office agreed to overturn convictions in 115 cases with little to no meaningful opposition to defendants’ claims.

Attorney General David Sunday, a Republican, said in a statement Tuesday that his office is grateful to serve “as a check on this process for the citizens of Philadelphia and ensure that the interests of victims’ families are represented.”

When an investigation shows that a defendant was wrongfully convicted, his office said, prosecutors have a duty to remedy the situation — through the established court processes.

“As the Court noted,” his office said, “this case is about the failure of the process in Philadelphia, both as to this defendant and many others.”

Krasner, for his part, stood by his office’s policies. Philadelphia is on track to record the fewest homicides in recent memory, he said in the video, and correcting past mistakes builds trust in the criminal justice system.

Acting as an adversary in overturning wrongful convictions, he said, “doesn’t help safety, it doesn’t help democracy, it doesn’t help freedom, but that’s OK. Because we know where we are in the fight, and once we get past the fight, we all win.”