Seth Williams was sworn in today as Philadelphia District Attorney. Local "progressives" backed Williams and are pleased with his election. He's the first African-American to hold the job and he's promised to institute some good ideas. One of them is community courts, an idea that has not been fully fleshed out but involves having the same judges deal with the defendants in a particular neighborhood who are repeatedly arrested. The other is an idea that I am more enthusiastic about:
Williams said he will not immediately make wholesale changes in the
operation - 300 assistant prosecutors, 250 support staff - that he will
inherit Jan. 5. But he does want to quickly replicate the "best
practices" he observed on recent visits to the prosecutors' offices in
San Francisco and San Diego.
The San Diego experience, he said, shows "the critical importance"
of improving Philadelphia's charging unit, where assistant D.A.s take
the details from police arrest sheets and write them up as criminal
charges.
More than half of the felony cases pursued by the Philadelphia D.A.
are dismissed at preliminary hearings, Williams said. He contended he
can improve on that score by assigning accomplished prosecutors to the
charging unit, which now often is staffed by the least experienced.
This may sound arcane, but it's really important. Usually, the youngest assistant district attorneys are put in the charging unit. They are constantly faced with the question of what charges to bring against defendants and with what degree. Their inexperience means they either are less able at reading the file and determining the relevant facts or don't have the best breadth and depth of knowledge of the criminal code. The end result is that defendants are sometimes charged incorrectly, either accused of things they did not do or not prosecuted for things they did do, or the wrong grade of the offense is assigned. The San Diego prosecutor's office, which I have read about elsewhere, has really had great success with making the charging unit a senior prosecutor's gig.
But while Williams is a reformer and perhaps will have a better rapport with the African-American community (which definitely had problems with Lynne Abraham), "progressives" shouldn't get their hopes up too much. Williams is a prosecutor, and in order to succeed in the D.A.'s office and win the top job, you need certain constituencies on your side. So when Williams says:
"Four years from now, we won't have the lowest conviction rate in the country," he said. [Instead, he said he] wanted "to make Philadelphia the safest big city in America ... ."
You have to hear those words through a white, blue-collar, cop-friendly Philly filter. We've seen repeatedly that the Philly police like to enforce the law their own way, whatever the civilians think. And for the conservative white people who live in Northeast and South Philly, law and order is about kicking ass, primarily black.
During the campaign, there were several cops who were murdered in the line of duty, and Williams sent out a Facebook message saying that anyone who murdered a cop, judge or prosecutor should face a mandatory death penalty. Williams knows full well that mandatory death penalties are unconstitutional and have been for a long time. What he was doing there was either reacting viscerally or playing to his police and law-and-order constituencies. Either way, it will serve him well. I think one of his first tests will come in the case of Officer Tepper, who was just fired after killing an unarmed civilian. Outgoing D.A. Abraham and the FOP chief McNesby have effectively thrown the matter into Williams' lap; unless I am very wrong, the grand jury will exonerate Tepper and Williams will then publicly announce he is satisfied with the outcome. I think he will have to in order to start off on the right foot with the FOP. And soon enough, I predict Williams will be going for the death penalty against black defendants at a rate similar to that of Abraham's.
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