WASHINGTON — A Philadelphia federal judge referred the City of Brotherly Love’s George Soros-backed District Attorney Larry Krasner to the Justice Department Tuesday for investigation into whether he violated the law while trying to protect the reputation of his top underling.
US District Judge Paul Diamond, a George W. Bush appointee, also ordered that both Krasner and Assistant District Attorney Matthew Stiegler be removed from involvement in relitigating a 2009 murder case at the center of the scandal.
In a shocking memo, Diamond wrote he had “reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia’s highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law” after hearing testimony alleging a pressure campaign against employees in the DA’s office who raised conflict of interest concerns revolving around Stiegler.
Staffers who had raised the issue were warned they could face “consequences,” court documents show.
Diamond found that Krasner and Stiegler’s conduct may have amounted to perjury, obstruction of justice, false statements under oath and conspiracy.
Krasner hit back in a statement declaring that “I respectfully and vigorously disagree” with Diamond, adding that “I look forward to appealing to the higher court as soon as the law allows.”
Johnson was found guilty of second-degree murder in 2009 for the killing of Kenyatta Smith during a botched robbery two years earlier, based in part on the testimony of two eyewitnesses who said Johnson pulled the trigger. He was sentenced in November 2010 to life imprisonment.
In November 2022, Krasner’s office filed a petition for Johnson’s release, arguing that he had received ineffective legal representation during the trial. That petition was signed by then-Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Mason, who Diamond noted had a background in patent and trademark law and “no experience as a criminal litigator.”
Stiegler, Mason’s boss, had assigned Johnson’s case to her the previous December, but had already decided to ask for his release after consulting Johnson’s new attorney as well as the local chapter of the Innocence Project, which advocates for prisoners it believes to have been wrongly convicted.
“Stiegler thus did not instruct Mason to do any independent investigation because it had already been done by Johnson’s counsel,” Diamond noted in his memo.
“Indeed, contrary to the Defender’s advice, he assigned an inexperienced ADA to Johnson, making it more likely that she would not question his actions or order.”
In June of this year, Krasner’s office moved to withdraw the petition signed by Mason, who had resigned days earlier, due to “material misstatements.”
In her resignation letter to Krasner, Mason said Stiegler had “used me to further his personal agenda of conceding in federal habeas cases regardless of the merits” and claimed she had “been asked to fall on my sword.”
On the same day the DA’s office moved to withdraw the November 2022 petition, Stiegler tried to scapegoat Mason, according to Diamond, saying that she “‘had purposefully inserted the false facts’ and that ‘this was one hundred percent her fault, zero percent his fault.’”
Krasner, meanwhile, told the four line prosecutors behind the withdrawal motion that Stiegler “gave me this really good idea. I think that we should go through Ms. Mason’s cases, find mistakes that she made in other cases, say that this was a pattern by her, and then file something with the Court saying that.”
When the prosecutors balked and suggested that Krasner refer the whole matter to the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General (OAG), the DA said, as one of the line prosecutors put it, that “we can’t send it to OAG because essentially they’re all evil” and “we have to have somebody in the room, in the courtroom to protect the office.”
Even after the motion to withdraw the petition was filed, Krasner continued to rant against the state AG’s office, according to Diamond, with the DA at one point referring to state lawyers as “Nazis.”
Still later, Krasner threated one of his prosecutors with unspecified “consequences” if they informed the court about Stiegler’s conflict, specifically that he had “a reputational interest in not doing a full investigation” into issues with the release petition.
Johnson’s bid for release is now in limbo due to the scandal surrounding Krasner. Diamond said the DA’s office could continue to handle the case moving forward, but it is not immediately clear which prosecutor might take it on.
