Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner was among the witnesses who took the stand in a City Hall courtroom last week to defend his office’s handling of its first exoneration in 2018.
His testimony, which stretched across more than four hours, came as part of an unusual right-to-know request filed by former city prosecutor Beth McCaffery, who is seeking to prove that she did not commit misconduct while prosecuting a man for murder more than a decade ago.
The litigation, however, has grown to represent something broader — serving as a vivid embodiment of the bitter divisions that have long existed between Krasner, a self-described reformer, and many former city prosecutors, who view him as vengeful and eager to tear down their prior work.
On the witness stand, Krasner, who is running for reelection, openly criticized lawyers who had spent years in the office before he was sworn in, and suggested they’d often acted unethically, if not illegally, to secure convictions. One of them, he said, is “lucky he’s not locked up.”
McCaffery’s lawyers, meanwhile, asked the district attorney pointed questions seeking to challenge the thoroughness of his office’s reinvestigation of the murder case it successfully overturned, and suggested that Krasner’s team moved too hastily to free a convicted killer from prison.
The case has caused not only Krasner to appear in court, but also his onetime chief of homicide, Anthony Voci, who admitted under questioning that he did not believe McCaffery had committed egregious misconduct — despite signing off on that assertion in court documents in 2018. Voci added that he had done “virtually nothing” to confirm that allegation or others contained in the documents, saying he had left much of the preparation to coworkers whom he trusted.
The case also caused Krasner’s office to admit it had temporarily misplaced three file boxes related to the case — despite the fact that Common Pleas Court Judge Anne Marie Coyle had ordered them more than two years ago to provide her with all of the case files to review. Attorneys said Wednesday that they’d found the boxes and would hand them over to the judge.
Whatever Coyle decides in the matter, it will have no impact on the underlying murder case. The former defendant, Dontia Patterson, has not only been freed, but he also settled a lawsuit against the city in 2020 for $1.7 million. (Patterson was separately convicted in 2023 of possessing drugs with intent to deliver and was sentenced to two years’ probation, court records show.)
In addition, both Krasner and Voci said they still do not believe Patterson committed the 2007 murder he’d been convicted of, a shooting in which 18-year-old Antwine Jackson was killed in Summerdale.
“I stand by everything in that motion,” Krasner said of his office’s 2018 application to drop all charges in the case.
‘Egregious’ misconduct?
The open records dispute, initiated by McCaffery, revolves around that decision to clear Patterson and set him free.
Krasner’s office said Patterson was convicted in part because of “egregious” misconduct by McCaffery, who handled a 2008 trial that ended in a hung jury, and fellow prosecutor Richard Sax, who secured a guilty verdict at a retrial the following year.
In their motion to dismiss the conviction, Krasner’s team said McCaffery and Sax illegally withheld evidence helpful to Patterson, including information about alternative suspects.
Although McCaffery and Sax are not named in the motion, the document said the concealment of exculpatory evidence “occurred over two trials” and added: “Prosecution that deliberately violates these constitutional rights is not law enforcement in any sense — it is a violation of the law.”
Sax at the time denied withholding any evidence, and also accused Krasner of seeking to dismiss the case because the two men disliked each other. In an interview last week, Sax again denied concealing any evidence.
McCaffery, however, did not comment publicly on the accusations against her when Krasner filed the dismissal motion. And in 2020, she and her attorneys, led by Bryan Lentz, decided to file a right-to-know request to seek access to the Patterson trial file, believing it would contain proof that McCaffery had disclosed everything as required by law.
Krasner’s office denied her request, saying the files were exempt from public disclosure under Pennsylvania’s open records laws. And after a series of steps through the courts, the matter was sent to Coyle, the city judge, to oversee.
A contentious court hearing
That is how Voci and Krasner ended up in her courtroom in recent weeks, testifying before Coyle while being questioned by Lentz.
The testimony and questions often veered well beyond typical open records issues, and into territory including how Patterson’s case was reinvestigated, whether the dismissal motion was supported by sufficient evidence, and how various lawyers behaved during the case’s history.
Krasner’s time on the stand was contentious from the moment he sat down. He and Lentz frequently interrupted one another and disagreed about nearly everything.
Then, while being questioned, Krasner gave an answer blasting Sax, saying: “Anything he was involved in as a lawyer was suspect, and he’s lucky he’s not locked up.”
(Sax, in last week’s interview, said such an assertion was “not worthy of a response.”)
The district attorney had similarly harsh words for former homicide prosecutor Ed Cameron, an office veteran who sent emails to colleagues expressing reservations about exonerating Patterson.
Krasner said he’d tried a case against Cameron before becoming district attorney, and, without elaborating, said he found Cameron’s behavior during it “troublesome.”
Krasner later said that Cameron oversaw a “win-at-all-costs” culture in the office, and insinuated that Cameron may have engaged in the destruction of evidence as part of it, saying he spent “a lot of time around the shredder.”
(Cameron died of brain cancer in 2020. Voci testified that Cameron was “in the top five [lawyers] that I’ve ever seen.”)
Coyle, the judge, frequently grew exasperated with the back-and-forth, urging the attorneys to stay focused on the issues more central to McCaffery’s open records request.
It was not immediately clear how the judge might rule on that issue — or when. She is expected to review the newly disclosed file boxes, and could take days or weeks to reach a conclusion about whether those records or any others should be made available to McCaffery.
In addition, any decision Coyle makes could be appealed to a higher court. The case — already entering its fifth year — is therefore unlikely to be fully resolved any time soon.
