D.A. candidate Larry Krasner gathers early attention in race

District Attorney candidate Larry Krasner believes his candidacy isn’t about him.

“I think the excitement is really about the ideas,” he said in a recent interview with The Tribune. “My background gives those ideas credibility, because there are people who talk the talk and there are people who walk the walk.”

The 56-year-old attorney, or at least his ideas, has seemingly drummed up a good deal of excitement in the 25 days that he announced he was running to be the city’s District Attorney. That enthusiasm propelled him to win an informal Philadelphia Tribune online poll asking visitors, “Who do you support for Philadelphia District Attorney?”

With more than 300 votes, Krasner won the poll, logging three times as many votes as the distant second-place finisher Tariq El-Shabazz, who received 100 votes. Teresa Carr Deni received 61 votes earning her third place. Democrat Rich Negrin was fourth with just over 40 votes while Joe Khan, Michael Untermeyer and Beth Grossman all received around 30 votes.

The poll opened on Friday, Feb., Feb. 24, and closed Friday, March 3, collecting more than 500 entries.

Although there is an African-American candidate in the race — former First Deputy District Attorney El-Shabazz — Krasner, who is not African-American, has drawn the backing of such African-American activists as Asa Khalif of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania, and attorney Michael Coard.

Born in 1961 in St. Louis, Missouri, Krasner attended public schools in St. Louis and Philadelphia before attending the University of Chicago for undergraduate school. Throughout his earliest school years up through the first year after college, Krasner said he worked in janitorial work, construction and landscaping.

In 1987, Krasner graduated from Stanford Law School in California and worked five years as a public defender in Philadelphia.

Krasner opened his own private practice in 1993 and said most of his civil rights work has revolved around police abuse and police corruption. Notably, he represented Askia Sabur, a Philadelphia police brutality victim who was beaten by officers in 2010 and went on trial in 2013. Ultimately, Sabur was acquitted of all charges and was awarded an $850,000 settlement against the police.

“I’m not important,” Krasner said in a phone interview, “but I have been around issues that are important.”

Krasner has represented protestors from Occupy Philly, the 2000 Republican National Convention and Black Lives Matter.

In a Tribune column, Coard called Krasner “pro-Black” and touted him as “an award-winning civil rights and criminal defense attorney who’s been practicing law for three decades—often as pro bono counsel.”

For this new chapter, Krasner hopes to meld his civil rights experience studying the constitution and the government’s occasional violations of the founding United States document with the power of the D.A.’s office to convict citizens. He’s come out of the gate critical of how the current D.A.’s office functions under District Attorney Seth Williams.

“This District Attorney’s office embraced mandatory sentencing, cash bail for poor people,” Krasner said. “This culture in the District Attorney’s Office cast a wide net that caught up the poor and brought poor Black and Brown people into the system when that was unnecessary.”

A major piece of Krasner’s platform is ending mass incarceration and a large part of accomplishing that, he said, involves ending mandatory sentencing.

“Mandatory sentencing in my opinion is almost always a bad idea,” he said. “Sentencing guidelines are set at a level usually much too high.”

Instead, Krasner wants to sentence individuals who have been convicted of a crime with a time that fits.

“There is a real consequence to taking someone who should be supervised on probation and giving them two years in jail or taking someone who should be doing two years in jail and giving them five years in jail,” Krasner said during his campaign announcement. “The real consequence is that it’s unjust and it’s unsafe.”

Krasner also wants to reform the cash bail system into something he called “sweat bail” which would require individuals awaiting trial to check into day centers each day rather than requiring them to sit in jail if they cannot afford bail.

Curbing or ending mass or “over” incarceration has been a subject for some of Krasner’s competitors including former deputy district attorney El-Shabazz, former assistant district attorney Joe Khan, attorney Rich Negrin and municipal judge Carr Deni.

In addition, Krasner wants to end the death penalty which he said is a waste of resources and create a culture in which drug and alcohol addiction is treated as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice issue.

Finally, Krasner wants to unite the community and law enforcement by fostering transparency and encouraging community policing.

Michael Untermeyer, one of Krasner’s democratic competitors, released his six-point plan to reform the criminal justice system on Wednesday. His priorities include reforming the civil asset forfeiture process, strengthening the Conviction Integrity Unit which investigates wrongful convictions, police and low-level drug prosecution reform and expediting the process to re-sentence juveniles originally sentenced with life without parole, which was ruled unconstitutional.

Khan also recently released an announcement calling to end prosecution for low-level drug offenses.

Beth Grossman is the only Republican candidate for district attorney, a long shot as Philadelphia hasn’t had a Republican district attorney since Arlen Specter who served two four-year terms until 1974.

About his vision for the D.A.s office, Krasner said, “I truly believe that this is a universal message for people of good will.”