This is a response to Wilfredo Rojas, a critic of Larry Krasner who complains about Krasner’s efforts to pursue justice in the loss of his son, a Temple student who was murdered.
Wilfredo, first, let me say that I’m very sorry for your loss. I was talking with a friend yesterday about families, like my own, where parents have had to see their children die about how this is the most devastating that can happen to a person. Nothing the criminal justice system can do will stop the ache in your heart. And that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to provide justice for our communities. As I said to others, human civilization is based on recognizing that injuries to individuals have to be answered by the community not by individual or family revenge. That idea is the most enduring legacy of Greek thought and practice and was immortalized in the Oresteia by Aeschylus.
The DA’s job is to answer to the community not to the families who are hurt by violence. And when you stop and think for a moment about how great an injury was done to you, you may understand why it is a step forward for all of us to have a system that works that way, in which justice is done with an eye to what benefits all of us not with an eye to securing revenge, which human experience shows leads to an unending cycle of vengeance.
What is happening in the streets of Philadelphia, where individuals turn to violence with little provocation and that violence is then returned with more violence, profoundly shows us what happens when the civic order breaks down, and revenge replaces justice.
So ultimately, the DA was not responsible to your family. He was responsible to all of us. I’m glad you had a chance to express your views. But the DA did not have an obligation to listen to them and do exactly what you asked. He had an obligation to justice and the civic order in our city. And from the results you describe, it seems that he carried out his duty, and justice was done, as your son’s murderer was convicted of first-degree murder and received a very long sentence.
DA’s can help. But they cannot restore order in our communities. The police can help, but they cannot do it, either. We need a massive effort on the part of everyone to undo the long-standing as well as immediate conditions that have created disorder.
The DA, however, can play a role in two ways. First, he or she can focus their limited resources where they are needed most. Second, they can not contribute by allowing their own office, as well as the actions of politicians and police officers to add to it with corrupt and abusive actions.
Under the last two DAs, the office not only looked aside when the police (and politicians) acted wrongly and corruptly but aided and abetted in that corruption by using testimony that was tainted by it in trials and by not prosecuting police officers for the abuse of their power.
Larry Krasner promised to end the corruption of the DA’s office and to not look away from corruption and abuse among police officers. He kept that promise. His opponent was part of the corrupt and abusive regime. He acted corruptly within it. He is backed by the FOP, an organization that protects abusive and corrupt police officers. And he is defended by former prosecutors who served in the corrupt administrations of DAs Abraham and Williams. (Not every one of these former prosecutors engaged in corrupt behavior. But by their willingness to work in an agency that tolerated and encouraged corruption, they lost any moral standing to impugn Larry Krasner.)
Democratic primaries are often a choice between people who differ in small ways and decisions about who to vote for are hard. This one is easy. Larry Krasner is not perfect. But we have a choice to make between a DA who will pursue pursuit and a DA who has corrupted justice and supports and is supported by the forces that corrupt justice in our city.
There is only one candidate people who care about justice can support in this race, and that is Larry Krasner