Category: Opinion

A number of judges have called out District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office for lying and sloppy lawyering in several recent exoneration cases.

A supervisor in Krasner’s office was disbarred last year for repeatedly lying while attempting to overturn a death penalty conviction. In June, another former supervisor was suspended from the region’s federal courts for three years for her role in attempting to mislead a judge in the same case. Last month, a former assistant district attorney said she was pressured to lie in court and instead resigned.

But judges have raised concerns about a lack of candor dating back to the first exoneration Krasner secured after he became Philadelphia’s chief prosecutor in 2018, according to a review of judicial rulings, court transcripts, as well as internal district attorney’s office emails and other documents obtained through discovery in a lawsuit and shared with The Inquirer.

Exoneration cases often take years to litigate. But just six weeks after Krasner was sworn in, his office vacated the first-degree murder conviction of Dontia Patterson. He was set free three months later.

Patterson had spent 11 years in prison after being convicted in the shooting death of Antwine Jackson. Patterson’s first trial ended in a hung jury with an 11-1 vote in 2008, but he was convicted at a second trial the following year based largely on the testimony of two eyewitnesses.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project, along with pro bono lawyers, began working on Patterson’s post-conviction appeal well before Krasner was elected as district attorney on a promise to end mass incarceration and reexamine past cases. The focus of the group’s claim was ineffective defense counsel.

But Krasner’s office offered a bolder theory: In addition to the ineffective counsel, it claimed prosecutors working under then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham and police withheld evidence that would have bolstered Patterson’s defense.

In May 2018, Anthony Voci, then the chief of Krasner’s homicide unit, signed a legal motion that called Patterson’s conviction “an egregious example of police and prosecutorial misconduct” and moved to drop the charges.

Along the way, Voci began coordinating with the DA’s press officer to spread the word to the media. “I think this could be a great story for our office to tell,” Ben Waxman, then the DA’s director of communications, wrote in an email to Voci on Feb. 28, 2018.

The district attorney’s office did not respond to requests to interview Krasner and Voci.

Three months after Waxman’s email, in May 2018, Voci made a stirring speech in court that referenced the Declaration of Independence’s guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and excoriated the former prosecutors, saying they were required to be right, sure, and fair.

Richard Sax, the former prosecutor who oversaw Patterson’s conviction, denied any wrongdoing. He said jurors concluded Patterson was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and a previous appeal of the conviction was denied. He called Krasner’s exoneration of Patterson “a horrific travesty of justice.”

Beth McCaffery, a former prosecutor who oversaw the first trial that ended in a hung jury, was offended by the attack on her character by Krasner’s office, and decided to fight to clear her name.

McCaffery filed a Right-to-Know request in 2020 seeking access to the case file, which she believed would show she operated by the book. Krasner’s office initially denied the request, claiming the information was not public, even though it had shared the files with researchers at the New York University School of Law.

At a hearing last year, McCaffery testified that she kept detailed notes and records of her cases that would show she acted properly.

Voci, who signed the motion that blamed the former prosecutors, also took the stand. By then, his story had shifted.

McCaffery’s attorney, Bryan Lentz, wanted to find out what sort of independent investigation Krasner’s office undertook before deciding to free Patterson.

“Before signing the motion, what did you do?” Lentz asked. “What did you review personally to assure yourself of the facts in this motion?”

Voci responded, “Virtually nothing.”

Turns out, prosecutors didn’t interview the two eyewitnesses from the trial or the former prosecutors who tried the cases. They didn’t interview a police officer who lived near the shooting, heard the gunshots, and saw a man fleeing the scene.

However, Voci did sit in on a PowerPoint presentation by attorneys from the Pennsylvania Innocence Project that focused on Patterson’s ineffective legal counsel, which the DA’s office largely adopted.

To be sure, a case could have been made that Patterson, who was 17 at the time of the killing, should not spend his life behind bars. Or that his defense counsel was inadequate, and that eyewitness misidentifications have been found to be a major reason for many wrongful convictions.

But Voci — who had previously criticized the prosecutors in court — testified that he didn’t believe everything he said.

“Were you onboard with accusing Beth McCaffery of prosecutorial misconduct?” Lentz asked.

“No,” Voci said.

“But you signed the motion anyway, right?” Lentz asked.

“I did,” Voci said.

Voci revealed something even more stunning: “I didn’t draft this motion, and I didn’t review it before I signed it.”

That would appear to violate the Pennsylvania Rule of Criminal Procedure, which makes clear that an attorney signing a motion certifies that he or she has read the document and believes the facts as stated.

Ed Cameron, who spent nearly 40 years in the district attorney’s office prosecuting mainly homicide cases, sent an email to Voci at 7:36 a.m. the day after Patterson was released. He said he was “up all night” and proceeded to question the exoneration.

“A lot of mistakes and misstatements were made in the ‘investigation’ and filing by our Office,” Cameron wrote, adding that he was never consulted about the motion to exonerate Patterson and blame the former prosecutors. After Cameron died in 2020, he was praised for his honesty and experience handling high-profile cases.

Voci’s testimony echoes a similar issue playing out in a separate exoneration case that is before U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond.

In that case, one of Krasner’s former assistant district attorneys, Jaclyn Mason, testified that the DA’s office failed to do any independent investigation in another exoneration case involving a convicted murderer and instead accepted the arguments provided by the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

Mason testified she signed the legal document asserting the man’s conviction should be thrown out, but didn’t independently examine all the evidence. Instead, Mason testified, she followed the orders of her supervisor, Matthew Stiegler, who she said told her, “‘If it’s good enough for the Innocence Project, it’s good enough for me.’” That case is ongoing.

Like Mason, Voci testified that he was just following orders, and that another lawyer in the office, Patricia Cummings, wrote the Patterson motion.

Krasner hired Cummings in January 2018 — the same month he was sworn in — to oversee the city’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which was set up to review old cases for wrongful convictions. She came from Dallas, where she started a similar unit, and reported to Krasner.

Cummings maintained a separate role while working in Krasner’s office as a research scholar at NYU School of Law — the same place that was granted access to the DA’s case files McCaffery had requested.

Cummings helped research and draft a 180-page report released by NYU that detailed a long history of prosecutorial misconduct in Philadelphia, an apparent conflict of interest that seemingly undermines the report’s independence.

Cummings had an opportunity to defend Patterson’s exoneration and the NYU report at McCaffery’s Right-to-Know hearing. But when called to testify, she failed to show up. (Cummings did not respond to questions I emailed her.)

McCaffery sued Cummings and NYU for defamation. The case was dismissed and is now on appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Separately, McCaffery’s effort to clear her name dragged on in court for four years. In March 2024, Common Pleas Court Judge Anne Marie Coyle issued a stemwinder of an opinion that stretched for 149 pages and found Krasner’s office unfairly accused McCaffery and Sax of misconduct.

The judge said the claims by Krasner’s office that the two former prosecutors illegally withheld evidence to secure a wrongful conviction were “intentionally and maliciously created” and “had no good faith basis.”

Coyle listed 11 scathing findings involving Patterson’s exoneration and the efforts to fight McCaffery’s Right-to-Know request, including that Krasner’s office “misplaced and/or destroyed requested records and relevant evidence.” She found the DA’s office “dishonorably publicly maligned” McCaffery and Sax.

The judge’s opinion echoed a recent finding by the state Supreme Court in a separate exoneration case when she found “the DA’s office demonstrated a patterned lack of candor” to the courts through “misstatements” and by “omitting salient” facts related to the post-conviction review of Patterson’s case and McCaffery’s Right-to-Know appeal.

Coyle said a culture existed within Krasner’s office “to denigrate prior prosecutors” and “prior administrations.”

She fined Krasner’s office $120,000 and called on an appellate court to impose more penalties. The DA’s office is appealing to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.

After Patterson’s release, he sued the city and received $1.7 million in a settlement for his time in prison. In 2023, Patterson was arrested for selling drugs in Kensington. He struck a plea deal with prosecutors in Krasner’s office and received two years probation.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project stands by its efforts to exonerate Patterson.

“Before the Pennsylvania Innocence Project agrees to take a case, we conduct a thorough, often yearslong review of the facts and the record,” Nilam A. Sanghvi, the Innocence Project’s legal director, said in a statement. “In this case, the facts pointed to Dontia Patterson’s innocence, and his exoneration was the just result. We will continue to pursue justice for our wrongfully convicted clients based on the facts.”

Krasner, a former defense attorney, has long railed against what he considered a win-at-all-cost mentality among police and prosecutors in the city. While Philadelphia has a fraught history of overreach by officers of the law and officers of the court, the remedy for any past abuses isn’t more of the same.

It’s a good bet that a suburban Cincinnati man named Cody Morelock probably never heard of “Ned Ludd,” the mythical English weaver of the early 1800s who became the avatar of a movement to save society from the destructive force of a new technology.

But Morelock was absolutely channeling the spirit of history’s Luddites, who smashed up the newfangled machines of the nascent Industrial Revolution, when he was allegedly captured on video toppling a Flock automatic license plate reader near his home and obliterating the high-tech device and the solar panel powering it.

Morelock was arrested after the June incident, and then prosecutors in Clermont County, Ohio took what looked like an open-and-shut case — with surveillance tapes, credit card receipts, and other hard evidence connecting the 35-year-old man to the alleged crime — before a grand jury of his peers.

But Morelock’s peers apparently didn’t see a crime in the wanton destruction of a Flock camera spying on their community. The grand jury refused to indict him — another victory for the 21st-century Luddites who’ve turned U.S. politics upside down with their rage against the machines.

Public anger over the dystopia of omnipresent cameras tracking their every movement has caused more than 50 municipalities from coast to coast to cancel or reject contracts between local law enforcement and Georgia-based Flock Safety, the leading firm.

But that’s just the tip of a political iceberg: What’s becoming a mass movement against Big Tech’s intrusiveness in our everyday lives has also seen activists in scores of communities beat back proposed data centers that power artificial intelligence, or AI. Suddenly, politicians in both parties are tripping over each other to oppose the advanced technology they were backing just months earlier.

This weekend, I watched an online ad from a former Democratic state representative in Massachusetts running for the Bay State’s open congressional seat. The ad channels voter anger over Flock cameras, citing two local cases of police using them to stalk unsuspecting citizens. She slams an opponent for raising money from Big Tech sources.

With a wicked Boston accent, Jamie Belsito says, “Flock cameras feed our movements into a massive searchable network that we know can be tapped into by ICE, and now — in our own backyards — we see how that power can be abused.”

The uprising against Flock and government mass surveillance is merging with the already explosive movement against new data centers, which now sees a whopping 75% of Americans opposed to building one in their hometown — a kind of unity that in today’s bitterly divided nation you wouldn’t even see for cuddly puppies or ice cream sundaes.

Here in Pennsylvania, which has become an epicenter of proposed data centers, a recent analysis by Spotlight PA found at least 20 state legislative races in November in which these facilities have become a pivotal issue.

A governor’s race that started with both candidates seen as data center advocates now has the GOP’s Stacy Garrity calling for a moratorium as Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro — who in 2025 posed in front of earth movers to hail AI complexes as the Keystone State’s bright economic future — issued stringent new regulations while calling data centers “secretive … predators” and “bullies.”

Did I mention that Shapiro is seriously considering running for president in 2028? Did I need to?

Even right-wing and zealously pro-business red-state Republican governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have turned sharply against data centers this year.

It seems like the only U.S. politician with anything nice to say about these energy-sucking, polluting behemoths is Donald Trump, who told reporters last week, “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”

You don’t need Kalshi to bet that dozens of Democrats will feature Trump’s toxic words in their fall campaign ads.

In the 21st century, the most exciting moments are the ones the TV pundits — who have more in common with their political drinking buddies or the cartoon villains of Silicon Valley than heartland voters — never saw coming. That list includes the progressive upheavals of 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, arguably a reaction not just to the Great Recession but Barack Obama’s tepid response, or 2017’s #MeToo movement after a man with multiple sexual misconduct allegations was elected president.

But then Trump’s two terms, including his popular vote plurality in 2024, were also arguably the result of public fury at elites, even if a big chunk of that anger was against the ones calling out racism or sexism or homophobia. It’s worth noting, of course, that the progressive revolts, especially 2020’s Black Lives Matter marches, sparked intense backlash, yet Trump’s MAGA movement now seems in full meltdown.

In one sense, the ability of billionaires and their endless money and their reactionary political allies to put down 21st-century unrest feels like a callback to the Luddites, whose revolution against the new machines changing the landscape of northern England in the early 19th century was also crushed, often violently, by the powers that be.

But Fred Hampton famously said, “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution,” and the radical spirit of the Luddites continued to fuel pro-worker and pro-human rights movements for two centuries. On the whole, the Industrial Revolution won, but in 2026, revulsion over the way Silicon Valley — and especially AI — is changing our daily lives so quickly feels as if things could turn out differently.

This moment was captured in a recent cartoon that roughly depicted George Jetson — whose world of flying cars was the future my generation of boomers was promised in the 1960s — doing the drudge work of vacuuming while Rosie the robot paints at an easel. Robots were supposed to free us to create beautiful music or write the great American novel in our leisure time, not do those things, as well.

To live in America in 2026 is to experience the constant anxiety of being watched by the government or big corporations — whether that’s on our phone or on the streets — and wondering when people stopped reading books, or whether that song was by a real person, or whether that video you just watched of the president (or from the president) is even real.

This weekend came news of an actual event in China called the World Humanoid Robot Games in which one of the robots shattered Usain Bolt’s world record for the 100-meter dash. Who wants this? … other than a handful of billionaires who are also rapidly building their own remote high-tech cities to save themselves from the looming torches and pitchforks.

They are going to need them. It was one thing when the Luddites trashed automated textile looms, when the meaning of work was up for grabs. That same threat is also posed by AI, which is starting to drag down the job market, but when robots take over track and field or pop music, people see that our fundamental humanity is under attack. That realization seems to have really kicked in this summer, and the future of our revolution is both exhilarating and somewhat scary.

Acts of vandalism — like the Ohio attack on the Flock camera — or worse are becoming somewhat more commonplace. Acts of violence — like the gunshots fired into the home of an Indianapolis city council member who supported data centers — are reprehensible and not helpful to the larger cause. In the present moment, there is rising hope that AI can be reined in the right way: at the ballot box.

When it comes to this issue, the ground beneath our feet may continue to keep shifting between now and Election Day. An article in Sunday’s New York Times described how the politics of data centers has scrambled a midterm election that was supposed to hinge on high gas prices and the growing threats to democracy. The piece noted that in Wisconsin and Florida — as well as Pennsylvania — the gubernatorial candidates from both major parties are now attacking the high-tech facilities.

Yet, it’s hard to jibe the politicians’ embrace of populism with news that the AI industry and its related political action committees will spend as much as $200 million on the November elections. What will happen in 2027 and beyond if, and likely when, the American body politic doesn’t have the strength to slow down these sprinting robots? Will Morelock’s alleged destruction of one Flock camera seem like child’s play?

The story of America in the 21st century has been a tale of widespread consensus that a grossly unequal and unfair nation is on the wrong track, yet bitter disagreement over whom to blame. Until now. The fight that no one saw coming — pitting everyday folks against billionaires and their robots, who can already outrun us — is about much more than an election for U.S. Congress. Today’s Luddites may be our best hope.