Larry Krasner cares more about an accused killer than a dead cop
Before the House Judiciary Committee, Joel Fitzgerald exposes the perverse priorities of the Philly D.A.
When it was his turn to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, Joel Fitzgerald wondered out loud yesterday why the district attorney of Philadelphia cares more about the welfare of an accused killer than he does about justice for a fallen police officer who is Fitzgerald’s murdered son.
And why he doesn’t care about that police officer’s grieving family.
“The D.A. in this city has displayed an incessant and transparent unwillingness to expose a person of privilege to the death penalty,” Fitzgerald said about Krasner’s devotion to Miles Pfeffer, the 19-year-old accused killer from Bucks County.
On April 24th, Fitzgerald and his wife Pauline had to visit the D.A.’s office, to point out to a committee of Krasner’s top officials all the aggravating factors in their son’s murder case.
The Fitzgeralds say the facts justify seeking the death penalty for the execution-style murder of their son, former Temple University Sgt. Christopher Fitzgerald.
But, Fitzgerald testified, “We should never had to do that.”
Why?
Because a district attorney, Fitzgerald said, “should stand up for the families and the victims of violent crime.”
A district attorney, Fitzgerald said, should “represent us and not have to be lobbied to do the right thing by law.”
But in Philadelphia, Fitzgerald said, we have a district attorney who cares more about accused killers than he does about murder victims and their grieving families.
“No family should ever have to lobby” a D.A. to do the right thing in the case of the murder of a loved one, Fitzgerald told the House Judiciary Committee.
Fitzgerald said he wound up leaving the D.A.’s office wondering if he and his wife didn’t do a good enough job playing amateur prosecutors before Krasner’s committee, “you won’t get justice,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s ridiculous.”
In his son’s murder case, Joel Fitzgerald said, the D.A. allowed judges to grant four continuances to give Pfeffer’s public defenders plenty of time to research potential mitigating factors that could spare the defendant the death penalty.
It took Krasner almost a year to hold a preliminary hearing in the case, a perfunctory event that was over in five minutes.
“This prosecutor, Larry Krasner, has ceded the advantage to the defense,” Fitzgerald testified. “He represents us. He represents my daughter-in-law. He represents my dead son. And he ceded the advantage to the defense attorneys.”
Fitzgerald wasn’t through unloading on Krasner.
The D.A., Fitzgerald said, “basically eviscerated a once noble police department, endangering the lives of all Philadelphians.”
In the name of reform, Fitzgerald said, Krasner is the guy who “opens the revolving door” for criminals so they can “come in and prey on” more victims like his son.
“He is part of that problem,” Fitzgerald said about Krasner. “He opens that door. He creates the recidivism.” He gives career criminals “the opportunity to attack Philadelphians.”
“The criminals in Philadelphia watch everything that goes on here,” Fitzgerald said. “They watch TV, they listen to the radio. They know that Krasner gives them a free pass.”
Early on during his testimony, Fitzgerald glanced over his right shoulder, toward the back of the room.
“First of all, I’d like to see if Mr. Krasner’s here, but I don’t think he is,” Fitzgerald said. “He had every opportunity to be here.”
Well, not exactly.
U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, admitted that he hadn’t invited Krasner.
But, the chairman suggested, if the Democrats on his committee were so proud of the reforms of their progressive D.A., they could have invited Krasner.
But they didn’t.
Speaking of Krasner, the D.A. held a press conference on Thursday where he blew some smoke at Fox 29 reporter Steve Keeley about how he might crash the House Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Well no, not only wasn’t I invited, Mr. Keeley, but they appear to be trying to sneak into town real quiet,” the folksy Krasner declared about the House Judiciary Committee. “This only came to our attention indirectly early yesterday.”
That wasn’t true.
As Joel Fitzgerald told the House Judiciary committee, “Mr. Krasner indicated he was not aware of this committee meeting until two days ago. This is patently false.”
When he and his wife met with Krasner on April 24th, Fitzgerald said, he told Krasner about the congressional hearing, and that he would be appearing there as a witness.
On April 24th, Fitzgerald sent an email to Krasner also notifying him in writing about the hearing.
On April 30th, Fitzgerald sent a 12-page memo to Krasner, lengthy portions of which I published yesterday, which also informed Krasner about the upcoming House Judiciary Committee hearing, and Joel Fitzgerald’s intention to testify as a witness.
At his Thursday press conference, however, Krasner was just getting started on his political posturing.
“We have seen a very clear pattern when the enemies of democracy want to put on a quote, hearing,” Krasner said, “It’s a dog and pony show with prearranged witnesses where they are deliberately going to make sure there’s a one-sided presentation.”
Although he wasn’t invited, Krasner said, if Jim Jordan or Matt Gaetz want to give him a call, “I’ll see ‘em tomorrow, I’ll even buy ‘em a cheesesteak. Maybe we’ll even have a debate because I think Philadelphia would love to hear their insights.”
And if Jordan or Gaetz actually dared to invite him to testify, Krasner told Keeley, he had two things to say:
“No. 1, hide your children,” Krasner declared. “No. 2, I’ll be happy to answer their questions, but that’s not what it’s about, it’s not about the truth.”
Speaking of political posturing, there was plenty of that going on at yesterday’s congressional hearing, as dueling Democrats and Republicans on the committee tried to dunk on each other.
Chairman Jordan got the ball rolling by announcing at the start of the hearing, “When you don’t prosecute bad guys, you shouldn’t be surprised that you get more crime.”
“When you defund the police you shouldn’t be surprised when you get more crime.”
“And when you have a designated area for illegal drug use, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get more crime.”
“Philadelphia’s doing all three of those things, and that’s why we have seen the increase in crime that you see in this great American city,” the Republican congressman from Ohio said.
Jordan called what’s going on Philadelphia right now a “recipe for disaster seen repeatedly in Democratic-run cities.”
The House Judiciary Committee has held hearings on the road about rampant violent crime in New York City and Chicago, as well as in Washington, D.C.
However, not everybody on the committee thinks the traveling circus is a great idea.
Jerry Nadler, a Democratic congressman from New York, cited Philadelphia’s declining murder rate and denounced the hearing, before it even got started, as just “pure political theater designed to produce a false narrative about Democrats.”
Nadler also complained about the House Judiciary Committee had attacked his own hometown district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for bringing “that serial felon Donald Trump” to justice.
The first witness who testified yesterday was Terri O’Connor, the wife of Corporal James O’Connor, who was gunned down by drug dealers while serving a high-risk murder warrant.
On March 13, 2020, on the night of her 45th birthday, Terri O’Connor testified, her husband “kissed me goodby, wished me another Happy Birthday, told me he loved me, and said, ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ ”
Then, she got the call that her husband was shot. A police escort followed to the hospital, O’Connor said, “where I saw my husband’s lifeless body.”
O’Connor told the committee about how police found ten guns and “an endless amount of drugs” in the place where the four gang members were hiding out.
One by one, O’Connor went through all the prior arrests that the four suspects had. How they were responsible for five murders. And how time after time when they were repeatedly arrested by police, how each armed and dangerous suspect had been repeatedly released by Larry Krasner and his team of prosecutors.
“We have a city in shambles,” O’Connor said. And “We have a district attorney who claims that crime is down.”
Regarding the trauma afflicted on her family, O’Connor said, “They took away something from us that can never be replaced.”
She told the committee how she became a widow “the day after I turned 45. I came to hate my own birthday.”
And she recalled how on his last day, her husband had suited up and went out to do his very dangerous job.
“If our district attorney” and his prosecutors had done their jobs, she said about her husband, “maybe he’d be here today.”
Pauline Fitzgerald spoke about the last moments of her son’s life, and how her daughter-in-law was now a widow with five fatherless kids to raise.
The next witness was George Bochetto, a trial lawyer who in 2020 was appointed by the state House of Representatives to impeach Larry Krasner.
Bochetto told the committee that after Krasner took office in January of 218, “What followed was an unprecedented explosion of crime and violence.”
Through “a combination of progressive policies and endless incompetence,” Bochetto said, “Krasner has actively promoted criminal behavior.”
Bochetto told the committee how when he took over as D.A., Krasner colluded with defense lawyers to file a fifth Post-Conviction Relief Act appeal on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted killer of Police Officer Danny Faulkner.
Krasner, Bochetto said, “told prosecutors to stand down, he was literally tanking the case to set free perhaps the most notorious killer in Philadelphia history.”
In the PCRA appeal, Bochetto represented Maureen Faulkner, Danny Faulkner’s widow. Bochetto promptly filed an emergency King’s Bench petition in state Supreme Court.
The petition sought to bar Krasner from prosecuting the Mumia case, Bochetto said, because of “terrible, irreconcilable conflicts of interest that Larry Krasner had in trying to tank this conviction.”
“Thank God the Supreme Court stepped in and we continue to maintain Mr. Jamal where he belongs, in prison,” Bochetto said.
Bochetto also ripped Krasner for being a '“one-man legislature” by issuing an edict that declared that prostitution in Philadelphia was no longer a crime. By edict, Krasner also declared that stealing less than $500 in merchandise was just a summary offense, the equivalent of a traffic ticket.
Regarding the ill-fated effort to impeach Krasner, Bochetto said, “We were essentially shut down by politics. We were never able to present our case. Impeachment is now in mothballs.”
Nick Gerace, a former cop who ran a pro-police PAC during the race for D.A., made a crack about “Uncle Larry, as the criminal underground refers to him [Krasner] so lovingly.”
“He is a serial killer by proxy,” Gerace said of Krasner. “It’s his policies that are killing Philadelphians.”
Gerace added that Krasner had a more devastating impact on Philadelphia than Covid had.”
At the hearing, U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon said she wished the House Judiciary Committee would explore “how Congress can help to reduce violent crime in Philadelphia,” rather than bringing a “traveling circus to town.”
She called the hearing led by Jordan a “political stunt” and a “cynical political circus that was trying to score political points off the pain of families who have suffered grievous losses.”
Scanlon then brought up her own experience with violent crime when two and a half years ago, he was “carjacked at gunpoint by three teenagers.”
“Obviously it, was scary to have a gun pointed at my chest,” Scanlon said before she made the most ludicrous statement of the day.
“But as I was looking down the barrel of that gun my mind raced,” she said, “thinking about the ways congress could have prevented that encounter by closing loopholes to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, including kids.”
Yeah, right, that’s what you’d be thinking about when somebody points a gun at you, rather than where to find clean underwear.
That gave U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Floridan Republican, an opening.
Gaetz, who described himself and a fellow congressman as “sympathetic criers,” said he was moved to tears by what Pauline Fitzgerald had to say about the last minutes of her son’s life.
Gaetz then asked Pauline Fitzgerald, “What was it like hearing Ms. Scanlon describe this as a circus?”
“We certainly aren’t circus animals,” Pauline Fitzgerald replied. “We are people. I’m born and raised in this city, and my entire family is here. And this city is suffering.”
Gaetz asked Joel Fitzgerald the same question.
“With all due respect, we aren’t circus animals,” Joel Fitzgerald said. “We suffered tremendous pain.”
“We have a vested interest and care” about Philadelphia, Joel Fitzgerald said. “And we wouldn’t be used as circus animals. We’re telling a story and we’re smart enough to be intent enough to communicate properly, and share what we feel and what our family feels.”
Score one for Gaetz, as Scanlon tried to repair the damage.
“I was not referring to the witnesses whose pain is very real,” Scanlon said. “I was referring to the actions of our colleagues as being circus-like and trading on the pain of other individuals.”
Memo to Mary Scanlon: The law you're thinking of is the Gun Control Act of 1968 which has been around since 1968, along with comparable state laws. Larry won't effectively prosecute violations. What would be the point of more laws to charge perpetrators with when the enlightened champagne socialist DA just dismisses all charges as usual?
Also, when she was carjacked there was an immediate arrest hours later, and the suspect apparently was in pretrial detention until a guilty plea last year and sentenced to over 7 years in prison. Mary, all we want is the same protection under the law that you and Paul Pelosi enjoy.
This man clearly articulates the anger and frustration in being a victim under this alleged DA.
Thank you Dr. Fitzgerald.