In what one local television station called “one of the most shocking and drastic shakeups of the district attorney’s office that anyone can recall,” newly-elected Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner fired 33 staff members, including division chiefs, long-time prosecutors, and high-ranking deputies, on Monday. And the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that “as many as a third of the office’s homicide prosecutors were asked to leave.”
Krasner, a former public defender, campaigned as a progressive, promising he would end the use of cash bail, reduce the number of people imprisoned, and would not seek the death penalty. In an interview with WPVI-TV, Krasner said that now that he is district attorney “my decisions are going to be informed by the fact that the death penalty is never imposed in Pennsylvania.”
Krasner’s victory is especially heartening because it comes just eight years after Lynne Abraham left the DA’s office. (His immediate predecessor, Seth Williams, was convicted of accepting a bribe, and is serving a five-year prison sentence.) The Fair Punishment Project included Abraham in its list of “America’s Top Five Deadliest Prosecutors,” and reported that under her 19-year leadership, the Philadelphia DA’s office obtained 108 death sentences. She was known as the “Deadliest DA,” according to FPP, and said she “described herself as ‘passionate’ about the death penalty.”