Pennsylvania's highest court has ordered new outside oversight of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner's post-conviction work, ruling 4-3 that his office submitted false evidence, withheld material facts, and pushed to free a convicted double murderer without a proper hearing. The decision, written by a fellow Democrat, strips Krasner of the ability to unilaterally concede convictions and mandates that the state attorney general be notified before any such relief is granted.
The ruling centers on Levar Brown, a Philadelphia man convicted by two separate juries, one in 2004 for the murder of Michael Richardson, another in 2005 for the murder of Robert Crawford. Two decades after those verdicts, Krasner's Conviction Integrity Unit conceded that Brown should receive a new trial and argued the court should grant relief without even holding an evidentiary hearing.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not merely disagree. It found, as Fox News Digital reported, that Krasner's office "conceded relief when it was not warranted by the existing record, 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." The majority concluded that the DA's concession in Brown's case "was not reliable."
That is not a policy disagreement. That is a court finding that a prosecutor's office misled a judge.
Justice Kevin Dougherty, a Democrat, wrote the majority opinion. Justice Daniel McCaffery, also a Democrat, joined him. The remaining two majority votes came from justices not identified by name in the court's public reporting. The 4-3 split means this was not a partisan ambush, members of Krasner's own party looked at the record and found it wanting.
Dougherty's opinion drew a bright line around prosecutorial authority. He wrote that "the prosecutor does not decide whether a defendant is entitled to relief under the Post Conviction Relief Act." That sentence alone captures the core problem: Krasner's office had been acting as if its concession settled the matter, bypassing the adversarial process that exists to protect victims, the public, and the integrity of jury verdicts.
The court's concerns extended well beyond the Brown case. The majority found that similar problems were "evident in other post-conviction cases as well." Since 2018, the Philadelphia DA's office has conceded relief "well over 100 times," mostly in murder cases. More than 1,000 additional cases remain in the Conviction Integrity Unit's review pipeline.
Those numbers deserve a pause. Over a hundred murder convictions conceded. A thousand more in the queue. And the state's highest court just found that the process producing those concessions involved false stipulations and withheld evidence.
Going forward, the ruling requires Philadelphia judges handling post-conviction challenges to notify the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General and allow it to intervene before granting relief in any case where Krasner's office concedes a conviction should be overturned. The order does not hand control of cases to the state. It creates a check, an independent set of eyes on a process the court found unreliable.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday praised the decision. His office stated that the court directed judges "to notify the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General of any concessions before granting relief, and to permit the Office of Attorney General to intervene in future cases where the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office attempts to concede a conviction."
Sunday framed the issue in terms any prosecutor should recognize:
"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 practical burden. The OAG Press Team told Fox News Digital that 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." Given the unknowns, including how many future concessions Krasner's office will attempt, "it may be difficult to fully assess these impacts until the process truly begins."
The attorney general's office also said 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.'" That last phrase matters. The families of Michael Richardson and Robert Crawford brought this fight. They are the ones who pushed back when the DA's office tried to undo the jury verdicts that held their loved ones' killer accountable.
The broader pattern of Soros-backed candidates facing accountability for the consequences of their policies is no longer confined to election cycles. It has reached the courtroom.
Krasner's office did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. Instead, the DA posted a video response online, one that featured images of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and cast the ruling as an attack on democracy and reform.
He described the decision as one where "we need to have the attorney general's office looking over our shoulder unlike every other county." He then asked: "Does that help democracy? No. It actually undermines the value of a vote in Philadelphia as compared to every other county."
The framing is revealing. Krasner treats the ruling as a political problem, an affront to his electoral mandate. The court treated it as a factual problem: his office submitted false evidence and withheld material facts. Those are not the same thing.
Krasner went further, invoking the language of social movements:
"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 offered: "Reform can be scary to those who need it." And: "Which part don't you like? The safety or the freedom?"
None of that addresses the court's specific findings. The majority did not criticize "reform" in the abstract. It identified concrete misconduct: false stipulations, withheld evidence, misstated facts, refusal to allow evidentiary hearings. Wrapping that record in civil rights imagery does not answer the charge. It evades it.
This kind of ideological deflection has become a recurring pattern among progressive officeholders. The broader progressive strategy of reframing institutional accountability as political persecution is familiar by now, and it is no more persuasive coming from a prosecutor's office than from any other corner of the left.
Justice David Wecht, a Democrat, dissented. He warned that the majority was "injecting the attorney general into local post-conviction proceedings and interfering with the discretion of Philadelphia's elected prosecutor." The dissent's framing echoes Krasner's own: this is about local control and prosecutorial discretion.
But the majority opinion explicitly addressed that objection. It stated that the order "does not strip Krasner's office of prosecutorial discretion" and that the DA's office "remains free to litigate cases as it sees fit." What it cannot do, going forward, is unilaterally concede a conviction and expect a judge to rubber-stamp the result without independent review.
The distinction matters. Prosecutorial discretion is a bedrock principle. But discretion does not include the right to mislead a court. When a prosecutor withholds evidence, submits false stipulations, and misstates facts, all findings the majority made, the system has an obligation to intervene. That is not an assault on democracy. It is the judiciary doing its job.
The court noted that the attorney general's independent assessment and participation will "enhance the reliability" of post-conviction proceedings. Given the record before the court, that is a measured response, not a dramatic overreach.
Brown's case now returns to the post-conviction court for further proceedings. The new trial order has been reversed. Whether Brown ultimately receives relief will depend on what an adversarial process, with both sides actually represented, produces.
The larger question is what happens to the hundred-plus cases where Krasner's office already conceded convictions, and the thousand-plus cases still in the pipeline. The attorney general's office has signaled it is still calculating the workload. The court's order applies prospectively, but the majority's factual findings cast a shadow over every prior concession that went through the same process.
Victims' families across Philadelphia now have reason to ask whether the concessions in their cases were handled with the same carelessness the court documented in Brown's. Those families, not Krasner's political brand, not his reform narrative, are the people who bear the consequences when a DA's office cuts corners on the truth.
The reach of Soros-funded political networks into the criminal justice system has been a subject of growing public concern. Krasner has long been identified as a beneficiary of that funding apparatus. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ruling does not mention campaign donors. It does not need to. The record it describes speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, the willingness of courts to impose structural checks on ideologically driven prosecutors may signal a broader judicial reckoning with the consequences of the progressive-prosecutor movement.
Krasner wants this to be a story about reform versus reaction. The court made it a story about facts versus fabrication. When your own party's justices find that your office submitted false evidence to free a convicted murderer, the problem is not that people are scared of reform. The problem is that the reform was built on lies.
