The next Monday, I was at my desk reading a small article in the Daily News that reported Judge Volo had broken his leg in multiple places on the street that weekend. The paper said he had been the victim of some kind of attack by a prostitute. Senior attorneys did a little checking around. Their version was that Volo, walking in his neighborhood as he liked to do, came upon a homeless woman urinating and tried to kick her to oblivion. She moved and he fell badly. His right leg was broken in multiple places; there were no other injuries really.
For the next year, from time to time, I would be in City Hall when I’d see Judge Volo walking the halls, first in a giant cast and then in a brace from foot to upper thigh, stomping along like the mad captain in Moby-Dick. The “American hero” was usually trailed by a phalanx of obsequious law clerks and court officers, a deferential half a step behind him on the quarter-mile-long square that was the hallway nearest his courtroom. Perhaps he walked to rehabilitate his leg, or maybe to burn off his vindictive energy.
Not long after, Volo was stripped of his robe and removed from the bench permanently by the federal courts for forcing potential jurors to attend trials where their religious beliefs and other perfectly good reasons would not allow them to sit as jurors. Removal of judges from the bench is very uncommon. The federal courts spoke out about his lawless imposition of servitude on people who neither were compensated (even at juror rates) nor served any purpose in the trials. There would be no more contempts or guilties or not-guilties with Judge Volo. It was a singular distinction for a supposed “American hero.”
Judge Volo wasn’t unique. He was simply an extreme example of a culture sometimes uninterested in justice or truth in Philadelphia that I encountered regularly as a public defender and private criminal defense attorney early in my career, but that started long before my time. He was on my mind twenty-eight years after my first jury trial before him, when I decided to run. Judge Volo wasn’t really the problem. The system was, and he was its distillation. The system had to change, which could only happen if we got to people outside the system and showed them how broken it really was.
After my February 2017 announcement, my first fundraiser was a low-dollar event at a batting cage called Everybody Hits. Its owner sported a 1970s mustache and was married to a young public defender. The event attracted a mostly young and mostly white crowd that drank local beer out of cans, flirted, and talked politics and music. A few nonprofit warriors and grizzled lefty union organizers who I knew slightly from protests or through mutual friends mingled among the crowd. After half an hour of mingling, I stood on the cage’s cement floor with a long-wired mic in hand and had a conversation with this slice of the community. Hands went up with questions.
We started with weed. Do you support making recreational use legal? “Yes.” A hum of approval and a few chuckles passed through the crowd. Will you prosecute marijuana use? “No. We have better things to do with our resources than punish people who are basically drinking beer at the end of Prohibition.” Louder buzz. Some laughter. “And, by the way, the beer you’re all drinking tonight is worse for you than cannabis.” Louder laughter, this time with grins and some side-glances in the mix. The older labor activists were watching, impassive, but they stayed. Someone asked if the criminal justice system was racist. “Yes.” Was it fair? “Not often enough. And especially not for poor people and Black and brown people.” Were there too many people in jail? “Yes.”
Before leaving, I posed for a picture with a bat over my shoulder that the owner instantly turned into a baseball card. Suit, tie, bat. I kept the card. Millennials with bills and student loans to pay pulled money out of their pockets in a humble batting cage and put together over a thousand dollars. It felt like a good night, and the people in attendance didn’t look anything like most people at a traditional political fundraiser.
The primary campaign was dominated by public forums featuring the seven Democratic candidates. Sometimes the lone opposing party candidate joined us even though it was the primary election. The race was wide open. The dominant party’s boss was loath to bet on a single horse with so many running and no favorite. The stakes were high at the forums, where we’d make our arguments directly to the public. The first forum was in a so-called business incubator, a giant converted industrial building in a mostly Black part of town across from West Fairmount Park, filled with offices and production facilities for start-ups. On the roof was an urban apiary, where beekeepers produced honey, which they bottled on-site. The bees supported the building’s gardens. The forum took place on a wide-open factory floor used for trainings and gatherings. With its pillars, giant joists, and thick, worn wooden floors, the place looked big and beefy enough for a car show. In Silicon Valley, this kind of space would have been full of hyper-educated techies; in Philly, it was diverse and grassroots and wildly varied.
Only one other candidate had equivalent trial experience. The rest had worked in prosecutors’ offices or, in one instance, had served as a judge but hadn’t tried the hard cases we had been trying for more than thirty years: federal criminal cases, including long trials involving giant conspiracies, death penalty cases, homicides, and everything else. These were the kinds of cases that put you under pressure to stay on point. The experience helped. Aside from giving me some insight into how the justice system in Philly actually worked for real people, thirty years in courtrooms helped me to read people, to think on my feet, to block or dodge a punch, to avoid distraction, to tell a true story, and to stay focused on the people who make the decision and their reactions, whether those people are jurors or voters.
Lined up seven-wide in tall chairs, we listened to one another. After brief opening statements by each candidate, we were questioned by the moderators. The other candidates mostly juked the questions to hit their repetitive talking points. Not wanting to give up a sound bite that would alienate any group of voters, they either said nothing or said two opposing things at once. Their evasive answers exemplified why people get so disgusted with say-nothing, forked-tongue politics. When I initially announced my candidacy with the details of my full platform, it wasn’t a one-time stunt; it set the tone for my whole campaign. I wasn’t going to win by being vague. And politics were so sideways that I realized I could distinguish myself from the other six just by answering the questions directly. Besides, I was fifty-six and my political ambitions were pretty much this or nothing; I was going to lock in, answer the questions, and win or lose on our platform.
The questions rolled in. I answered them. They were the same questions I was getting almost everywhere I went. Was the criminal justice system racist? “Yes.” Were there too many people in jail? “Yes.” Was there a problem with police accountability? “Yes, a big one.” And what were the causes of these problems? That question required a longer answer.
The problem was our broken system—unjust criminal justice institutions, traditional prosecution, and traditional prosecutors. Every other candidate running had been a part of our broken system, whose worst manifestation was the Volos of the world. It would be one thing if the other candidates could prove they had worked to improve the system from within or that they had quit the system because they could no longer bear to work for one that delivered so much injustice. But that’s not what happened. None of these candidates had written a memo in 2000 or 2006 or 2012 pushing for positive change in the system. They were content to serve a system that was known for extreme mass incarceration, mass supervision, stepping on the poor, convicting innocent people, not turning over required evidence, and manipulating and lying to victims rather than meeting their needs. As a candidate, you need to own your life’s work. My life’s work had been pushing against that system, not serving it. How had they done more than serve the life-destroying engine of our broken system?
I said all that at the panel and then shut up. After I got quiet, the other candidates got hot. The panel quickly shifted from seven candidates trying to different
iate themselves from one another to the six of them gunning for me. I was unexpectedly taking a lot of fire, but suppressing a smile. The other candidates’ attention focused the audience on me and my platform. I had fully expected them to hit back by embracing conservative criminal justice themes. I expected the lite version of traditional “lock ’em up” law-and-order talk with its emphasis on scaring voters. Instead, one by one they asserted that they were progressive, too, just not a crazy progressive like me. They positioned themselves as more qualified, balanced, and moderate than me because of their prosecutorial experience, while offering few clear positions.
My platform was clear. The other candidates were punching me with the fact that I hadn’t been a prosecutor, thinking that would get me out of the way for the real battle among them. But what none of us knew yet was that being a prosecutor, being a cog in this punitive machine, was no longer something a candidate wanted on their résumé. I was as surprised as anyone to see that my public defender history was my advantage. That shift of position and attention turned me and my supposedly extreme views into the other candidates’ point of reference. Suddenly, they were all following our platform, timidly going our way.
When the forum was over, people came up to each of us, asking questions and mostly holding back their opinions. It was hard for me to gauge whether my straightforward, combative approach was turning off the public or animating them. An elderly, dark-skinned Black woman approached me, lightly pushing her walker. She was tiny. She tilted her head slightly, peered at me through her glasses, and said, “I noticed something about you. When they asked you a question, you answered it. You were direct. Direct. That’s very important. You stay direct and you’ll do all right.” She looked me in the eye again for just long enough. I thanked her for her kind words and advice before she walked away. I never got her name, but I followed her advice in more than fifty forums over ninety-eight days. I stayed direct.
In my jumbled-up campaign days I found myself one Sunday afternoon at a storefront Baptist church in a neighborhood of row houses in varying levels of disrepair. There were tire shops selling used tires. The parked cars were older models. A couple of people had their cars’ hoods up. Inside the church, portable chairs for parishioners were laid out in a few rows. I sat on a well-worn red velvet seat on a high metal stool, facing the audience. The microphone’s amplification was punctuated by squeak and feedback. Behind my head hung a large sign that announced in big letters: The Devil Can’t Have My Family.
No more than twenty seats were occupied, mostly by older Black women wearing big, colorful hats, and their elderly male companions. I took it all in and wasn’t sure why I’d been invited to speak. I was the only candidate there. This was not a church that I knew, nor was it connected to any of my friends in Philly’s progressive clergy. And these might or might not be my voters. Having tried a lot of cases in Philadelphia, I’d found that older, churchgoing African Americans on a jury can view crime, even minor crimes, harshly. I’d been hired by a lot of them to represent a nephew or a grandchild. Many of them told me they disapproved of weed; of pants worn low; of hip-hop, social media, and overt sexuality; of skipping church. Many had experienced victimization from terrible, tragic crimes in their families. I was wondering how this churchy room might react to me and our pro-decarceration platform, but I was grateful for the invitation to appear solo and wanted to connect.
I began speaking while a few latecomers drifted in. A tall, beautifully dressed older woman who was wearing a yellow hat to match her outfit thanked me for attending and said the congregation had never been addressed in their church by an elected prosecutor or someone running to become one. She then asked me not to be offended by what she had to say next. I held my breath for what came next. “You need to understand that, to me, a prosecutor is like…a devil. The prosecutor is the one who takes the neighbor boy when he gets in some little trouble and gives him two years in jail. So he can’t get a job. The prosecutor is the one we call for help when police are not treating the children right. And they do nothing. They do nothing. So we are here to listen to what you have to say, but you need to understand that to us a prosecutor is, well, like a devil. So we would like to know how you are different.” As she finished her question, I was breathing and smiling. These were my voters, too. I was home. I began my answer.
The church door opened and I saw Russell, an old client, and his wife, Lydia, who had hired me to defend him a few years prior. He was a big, strong, and sunny broad-shouldered man of fifty who had been the on-site manager at a McDonald’s for a couple of decades when he was charged with aggravated assault. He’d had no criminal record until he was arrested. He’d believed a security guard had mistreated his wife, lost his cool, and, with one punch, broke the guard’s jaw in two places. She came in the church with him, beaming, and kissed my cheek.
He was facing three or four years in jail when I represented him. We tried the case to a jury, and got a not-guilty verdict on the main charge of aggravated assault, which carried a couple years in prison. He was found guilty of the lower, misdemeanor charge of simple assault and spent four months in jail, including some time served in jail earlier, right after his arrest. Lydia visited him every week. He got out and got his job back. His life was interrupted, not destroyed. He was smiling when he walked in and said, “We’re so glad the pastor invited you. We asked him to do it; this is our church.”
Small and large gatherings continued, often several in a day. Surrogates filled time when I was late or when my schedule was too full to allow me to attend a smaller event. My campaign manager, Mike Lee, told a story for the grassroots activist, organizer, and millennial crowd that he polished over time:
So my wife is pregnant and we’re expecting our first child. When I’m home, which is more now, I watch a lot of Animal Planet, which I probably would have done anyway, even if she wasn’t pregnant. I love Animal Planet. I saw this show about penguins in the Arctic that I think says something about why we are all here.
At this point some of the listeners usually got quiet and began to fold their arms and squint, unsure whether Mike’s naïve affect and deadpan delivery meant a joke was coming or Mike was the next generation’s Mr. Rogers:
So penguins gotta eat. They’re social. And they tend to gather together on an ice floe, surrounded by dark, threatening ocean. But they gotta eat. So usually one of them goes to the edge of the ice floe, looks in the water, and senses danger, which is true: orcas, polar bears, sharks swimming around just waiting for their own meals. Mmm…a tasty penguin. But the penguin’s hungry, too. Hungry for fish. The penguin’s thinking about it. The danger and the fish. Finally, he jumps in the dark water. He’s gotta get that fish. And, when he does, a little later one by one at first and then all at the same time, the other penguins jump in, too. Splash, into the water. Now they’re in the water, looking around at each other and looking for fish. There’s still danger, but there’s less danger because they’re all together. And they’re filling their bellies with fish.
Now, to me, that’s a lot like this campaign. Larry’s that first penguin. He had something to lose, but he jumped in. We watched and then jumped in, too. Except in our case, we weren’t hungry for fish. We were hungry for justice.
The laughter usually started in earnest around “Larry’s that first penguin” and filled the room around “hungry for justice.” It was a break we all needed from Philly’s traditional politics.
Philadelphia is a ward politics city, or used to be. Each neighborhood has one ward leader for each major party, whose job is to get out the vote through the assistance of the ward’s committee people. The committee people and ward leaders who are closest to their communities solve problems for the wards’ residents—they ask the city to fill potholes in the neighborhood or sort out local homeowners’ and businesses’ entanglements with the byzantine details of local government.
Ward leaders are unpaid by the
ir party, in theory, although some of them find legitimate ways to make a little money before and on election day by getting out the vote. And the slippery ones find less legitimate ways to make even better money by lying to candidates, taking their money in exchange for the promise of working all day to pass out their literature and persuade voters to vote for them, only to double-cross them on election day and persuade voters to vote for someone else, with different literature in hand.
On election day, the city’s few thousand polling places see streams of voters. The ward leaders’ committee people stand outside the polling places and give out palm cards with highlighting, bright colors, and short lists that tell the voters—their neighbors—which candidates the ward deems worthy. They also chat up voters as they go in to vote. The power of the chat is no joke among undecided or underinformed voters, especially when the committee member may have helped that voter with a problem that required some assistance from a representative, or when their kids attended school together or played together in Little League. Even though this kind of street politics in Philly is aging and evolving, committee people still matter. And for a candidate, courting ward leaders and committee people matters, too.
Halfway through the campaign, maybe forty days in, I found myself in a dimly lit bar in West Philadelphia around sundown. This was a ward event. Candidates were there to meet the local ward leader and his committee people at an open bar. Old-school 1970s and ’80s music was blasting—the Temptations, James Brown, the Commodores, the Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang—while we candidates awkwardly made the rounds, introducing ourselves to the people in the room. The bar was serving mostly tallboy beers, shots, and malt liquor.
Four or five older Black women were sitting on a wide windowsill. I walked over and introduced myself. I had to say my name a few times as I tried to be heard over the music. One said, “Krasner? You’re Krasner?” She looked over to her friend. “Who’s that guy? Who’s the civil rights guy? Are you the civil rights guy?” I said, “Yes, I’ve done civil rights work and criminal defense work for thirty years.” The women looked at each other. One asked the other for an ink pen, got it, and circled my name on her printed list of candidates. She told the woman at the far end of the windowsill: “He’s the civil rights guy.” They exchanged a look and nodded to one another. I thanked them and walked away. It sounded good.
For the People Page 21