Pennsylvania's highest court told Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner that he does not get to decide on his own whether convicted criminals walk free, and ordered the state attorney general to start looking over his shoulder.
In a 4-3 ruling, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed a post-conviction order that would have granted convicted murderer Levar Brown a new trial after Krasner's office conceded the conviction should be overturned. The majority went further, ordering that Philadelphia judges must notify the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General and give it the chance to intervene before granting relief in any future case where Krasner's Conviction Integrity Unit concedes a conviction should be tossed.
The ruling landed with unusual force because the majority was not a partisan affair. Two of the four justices who signed on, Justice Kevin Dougherty and Justice Daniel McCaffery, are Democrats. They joined two Republican colleagues to form the majority. The three dissenters were all Democrats, led by Justice David Wecht, who warned that the decision injected the attorney general into local proceedings and interfered with the discretion of Philadelphia's elected prosecutor.
The case centered on Levar Brown, who was convicted by a Philadelphia jury in the 2004 murder of Michael Richardson and by another jury in the 2005 murder of Robert Crawford. Roughly two decades later, Krasner's Conviction Integrity Unit conceded that Brown should receive a new trial, and argued he deserved relief without an evidentiary hearing.
The families of Richardson and Crawford brought the matter to the state's high court. What the justices found was damning. Fox News Digital reported that the majority concluded Krasner's office conceded relief when the existing record did not warrant it, withheld material evidence from the court, submitted a false stipulation of fact, misstated facts in its pleadings, failed to conduct a reasonable investigation, and opposed a required evidentiary hearing.
That is not a minor procedural disagreement. The court found a pattern of conduct that made the DA's concession, in the majority's word, "not reliable."
Justice Dougherty, writing for the majority, put it plainly:
"The prosecutor does not decide whether a defendant is entitled to relief under the Post Conviction Relief Act."
The opinion noted that the problem extended well beyond Brown's case. Since 2018, Krasner's office has conceded relief "well over 100 times," mostly in murder cases. More than 1,000 additional cases are apparently still waiting for review by the Conviction Integrity Unit. The court's new requirement, that the attorney general be notified and given the opportunity to intervene before any such concession results in relief, applies to all of them going forward.
The majority was careful to say the order does not strip Krasner's office of prosecutorial discretion. The DA's office remains free to litigate cases as it sees fit. But the court made clear that when Krasner's team agrees with a defendant that a conviction should be overturned, a Philadelphia judge can no longer simply rubber-stamp the concession without an independent check.
The ruling sends Brown's case back to the post-conviction court for further proceedings. It stops short of handing control of cases to the state attorney general. But the practical effect is significant: an outside prosecutor will now have standing to challenge Krasner's concessions before they become final.
Krasner's pattern of conceding murder convictions has drawn scrutiny for years. The concern among victims' families and law enforcement advocates is straightforward: a DA who was backed by George Soros-linked political spending has used the Conviction Integrity Unit not as a careful check on wrongful convictions but as a conveyor belt to undo jury verdicts, sometimes, the court found, by withholding evidence and misrepresenting facts to judges.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday praised the ruling. His office told Fox News Digital it "appreciates the court allowing the AG's office to 'serve as a check on this process for the citizens of Philadelphia and ensure that the interests of victims' families are represented.'"
Sunday framed the issue in terms of the adversarial system itself:
"As prosecutors, our role is to advocate for victims of crime, for public safety, and for justice. Centuries of experience teach that the best way to achieve that justice is through the adversarial process, with vigorous representation for both sides."
His office acknowledged the new responsibility will not be simple. It is "assessing what yesterday's Supreme Court of Pennsylvania order will mean for our office's workload and what impacts it may have on our budget and our personnel," the AG's office said. Given the unknowns, including how many future concessions Krasner's office will make, "it may be difficult to fully assess these impacts until the process truly begins."
The scale of the task is not trivial. With more than 1,000 cases still in the Conviction Integrity Unit's pipeline, the attorney general's office could be drawn into a substantial volume of post-conviction litigation in Philadelphia alone.
Krasner's office did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. But the DA posted a video response online in which he cast the ruling as an attack on democracy and reform.
In the video, which featured images of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., Krasner framed his work as part of a broader social justice movement. He told viewers:
"The truth is that criminal justice reform is a national social justice movement. And like all other social justice movements, it follows a certain pattern. 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 eight and a half years. And then the next step, we got to get there, is you win."
He also asked: "Reform can be scary to those who need it. Which part don't you like? The safety or the freedom?"
And he argued the ruling undermines Philadelphia voters' choices: "Does that help democracy? No. It actually undermines the value of a vote in Philadelphia as compared to every other county."
That framing sidesteps the substance of the court's findings. The majority did not question Krasner's right to hold office or campaign on reform. It questioned whether his office told the truth to judges, and concluded, based on the record in Brown's case and others, that it did not.
Krasner is not the only progressive prosecutor funded by Soros-linked organizations to face institutional pushback. In Virginia, the Department of Justice has opened a probe into a Soros-backed Fairfax County prosecutor over plea deals involving illegal immigrants, a case that has divided even Virginia Democrats.
The pattern is consistent: progressive DAs elected with outside money adopt policies that prioritize leniency, then face resistance from courts, legislatures, or federal authorities when the downstream consequences become too severe to ignore.
Krasner's situation is distinctive because the check came from his own state's supreme court, and from fellow Democrats on the bench. Dougherty and McCaffery did not need a Republican majority to reach their conclusion. They read the record, found a DA's office that withheld evidence and submitted false facts, and acted accordingly.
The dissent, led by Justice Wecht, warned that the majority was overstepping by inserting the attorney general into local proceedings. That objection has some institutional logic. But it runs headlong into the majority's factual findings: if a DA's office is not being honest with the court, the court has every reason to bring in someone who will be.
Victims' families, the people who brought this case to the high court in the first place, now have a meaningful safeguard. Before Krasner's office can agree to undo a murder conviction, the attorney general will have a seat at the table. That does not guarantee any particular outcome. It guarantees that someone in the room is asking hard questions.
The ruling also arrives at a moment when state and federal courts are grappling with post-conviction integrity questions across the country, making the Pennsylvania decision a potential model for other jurisdictions watching similar dynamics unfold.
Meanwhile, Krasner's Conviction Integrity Unit still has more than 1,000 cases in its queue. The broader network of Soros-funded institutions that helped put prosecutors like Krasner in office continues to operate. But in Pennsylvania, the state's highest court has now said, with bipartisan authority, that reform does not mean a DA gets to rewrite the facts.
Krasner wants to talk about democracy and social justice movements. The court wanted to talk about withheld evidence and false stipulations. Those are not the same conversation.
A DA who concedes murder convictions more than a hundred times, mostly without the adversarial process that the legal system depends on, is not advancing reform. He is dismantling accountability, and the families of Michael Richardson and Robert Crawford had to go all the way to the state supreme court to get someone to say so.
When two Democratic justices look at your record and conclude your office cannot be trusted to tell the truth to a judge, the problem is not that reform is scary. The problem is that the reformer stopped being honest.
