Half an hour later, Romeo walked over to me in the lobby of the Criminal Justice Center on his way out of the building. My poster boards of protest photographs, which had been excluded from the trial for being historical, were leaning against a glass window, not far from a trash can. They were useless now. After a quick greeting, Romeo looked the poster boards over and told me he wanted to show them to his daughter, who might want to take them to her elementary school. He said goodbye, picked them up, put them under his arm, and exited the courthouse doors. Through plate glass windows, I watched as he made his way down the street through the early evening shadows of City Hall. His back got smaller and smaller as he carried history that had been excluded from a courtroom into the streets of Philadelphia on his way home.
Those four years representing 420 idealists broadened my understanding of the district attorney’s power and how it could not only save or destroy people’s lives but also change the course of history. When Philadelphia’s district attorney Lynne Abraham decided to sucker-punch 420 people for nothing more than caring to improve their country by using their constitutional rights, she might as well have punched a mirror. Four hundred and twenty people were tortured in buses, in jail cells, and in their thoughts with the knowledge that a criminal conviction could not only land them in jail serving a sentence but, more important, ruin their ability to get jobs and pursue their futures in freedom. Some of them lived with this fear for years until they got their nearly universal dismissals and acquittals.
These 420 future leaders and I, and their circles of influence, would forever be radicalized by witnessing just how profoundly the criminal justice system had been corrupted and how much it needed to be reformed as we defeated that seemingly all-powerful system one case at a time. I had thought myself disillusioned before, but those four years of cases underscored for me that the criminal justice system was more about politics than justice. I had seen up close how the system would lock up anyone, literally anyone, for literally anything, and lie whenever convenient to justify it. I saw again that power does what it wants, but that doesn’t mean it always wins. We won. And that history can’t be suppressed.
I also understood, for the first time really, who was the linchpin of power in this corrupted criminal justice system. One person, more than any other, had enormous power that she wasn’t using for the people. That was Philadelphia’s chief prosecutor, its district attorney, who ordered her most elite, aggressive homicide trial prosecutors to put aside their homicide cases and relentlessly prosecute the protesters. It was the Philadelphia DAO, in league with other criminal justice system players, whose unjust tactics and abuse of power radicalized 420 people and, though I didn’t know it then, planted the seeds for our 2017 election campaign.
CHAPTER 14
And Then We Won
Time has come today
Hey
Oh
The rules have changed today
—The Chambers Brothers, “Time Has Come Today”
The legendary Saint George slayed a dragon and spared its next victim, a princess (of course). No more fiery breath. The Saint George I’d like to know becomes the dragon and breathes its fire for good, using its power to protect others, princesses included. No one yet has written the legend of George becoming the dragon or addressed the difficult questions it invites. How do reformers go from fighting something powerful and scary to taking its power to become its better self? On election day, those were the kinds of tough questions I hoped I would be given the chance to answer. We would need answers only if we won.
I went into the all-important primary election day, May 16, 2017, more preoccupied by the details than nervous. After listening to my campaign team’s carefully worded input, I figured the next district attorney of Philadelphia, and the future of its criminal justice system, would be decided by a few hundred votes either way. Best-case scenario, we would win a close one after a very long night. If we lost, we would probably finish second or third. I still gave myself a 40 percent chance of winning, which wasn’t too bad for a “liberal unicorn” and his “hilarious” candidacy. With seven candidates, the vote differences could be very small.
There is no way to drive, walk, hug, and handshake through every polling place in a city of 1.6 million people in thirteen hours. But on election day, we tried. The task was to be visible at polling places for news media, on social media, and to voters waiting in line and to encourage the legions of volunteers and paid election day workers over the arduous course of the thirteen hours when the polls were open.
Traveling in an unlikely, small convoy that consisted of one newer electric car and an old behemoth Chevy Suburban driven by my poker buddy Andy deLone, we were a mostly rotating crew of supportive volunteers and a few supportive elected officials who were the best matches for our targeted stops. We visited a dozen polling spots where my campaign strategist Brandon thought we were strong or where we even thought we had a shot. As the 8:00 p.m. voting deadline approached, we shot a social media video of me bouncing around in the car’s back seat. I reminded everyone it wasn’t too late to vote; we pushed it out. Most of the work that mattered had already been done, but we were doing every last bit we could, knowing that even in the final hour every visit or door knock or social media hit could be the decisive one in a close race.
My sons, Nate (twenty-six) and Caleb (twenty-four), were in town from New York and San Francisco, respectively, working polls. My mother-in-law, Sally, and her best friend, Ruth, were in from Nebraska, at a polling place that attracted a lot of seniors, drinking tea and serenely pushing that Sally’s son-in-law deserved their vote. Sometime during the afternoon, I cuddled a golden retriever puppy that was plopped into my arms outside a polling place while campaign volunteers took pictures and spread them on social media in search of the dog lovers who hadn’t voted yet. I didn’t want to give the golden back. Holding the docile puppy was a strangely comforting respite. I was emotionally worn out, with hours remaining until the polls closed in a long day of electoral battle. I couldn’t help but laugh an hour later, at a different polling place, when paid electoral workers for another candidate asked for our literature to hand out and put on our campaign T-shirts after learning more about the platforms of their candidate and ours.
I met people all over the city who made me hopeful that maybe the city was ready for change. I met a woman in her thirties who explained that her cousin was still unemployed after a youthful conviction. A young Black man told me he had thought of becoming a police officer until he was illegally stopped and humiliated. There was the middle-aged plumber who was the victim of a gunpoint robbery complaining that his requests for more information on the case had gone unanswered. In a more affluent part of town, I spoke to the parent of an autistic teenager who explained that her child’s disability was misinterpreted by police, leading to an arrest and several traumatic hours in custody.
Our people were everywhere—campaign volunteers, activists, and volunteers with self-organized local groups named things like 215 People’s Coalition, Pennsylvania De-Carcerate, and Reclaim. Our people were working the polls, working train platforms for votes, and following up on lists of likely voters for our campaign from people who had responded to the canvassing and the mass texting we’d done weeks before that had reached tens of thousands of people.
Around 6:30 p.m. we stopped by a polling place in South Philadelphia, a historically Italian and Irish neighborhood that Frank Rizzo had won heavily in the 1970s. Polls were closing at 8:00. We were spent; it was along the route to our Center City political headquarters, which would soon be our next and last car stop. Until recently, the ward leader had been a powerful insider when he wasn’t attracting the attention of the feds. I’d come there in the early evening to see how South Philly’s polling places looked, but I didn’t know exactly what to expect in a changing, old-line white ethnic blue-collar neighborhood known historically for its multigenerational
hold on patronage, conservative labor, and ward politics.
As I sat for a moment on a cement retaining wall by the front of the polling place, I didn’t see the old row-house South Philly coming inside to vote. I saw young working women carrying yoga mats on their shoulders. I saw hipsters pulling up on one-speed “fixie” bicycles. Lightly tattooed couples in their early thirties were socializing with one another on the playground while their toddlers played together.
In front of the polling place, I spotted the new ward leader who was a loyalist to the old one. His salt-and-pepper hair was slicked back, touching the collar of what turned out to be a poly-satin union jacket. I greeted him and he answered back, courteous but curt. And then we sat some more, apart, watching the same thing and I suspect coming to the same conclusions: The neighborhood was changing. It was still this poo yai ban’s ward, but these were not his voters. They were mostly young, mostly educated people. Many were working white-collar jobs. Many were dragging a bag of student debt. Some were young parents or parents-to-be, seizing the chance to live in the catchments of a couple of excellent public schools in an otherwise struggling public school system.
Like the generation they were replacing, they were mostly white. Unlike much of the prior generation that had left for New Jersey and nearby suburbs, these newer residents preferred life in a diverse, vibrant, affordable city to what was offered in the nearby New Jersey suburbs. This was not a hive of patronage workers or members of exclusively white unions. Some were artists; some were openly queer. Biracial couples showed up. Within a year, a former public radio journalist and mother of two young children would become the state rep there, beating out an old-guard candidate whose family connections and career as a detective no longer guaranteed him a win. And the state rep’s husband, a small contractor and former welder whose day job was retrofitting aging buildings to make them more energy efficient, would become the new ward leader.
By 7:30, after fourteen hours of moving from polling place to polling place around the city, our dwindling caravan of campaign workers and volunteers finally returned to our campaign HQ, my old law office. It was time to gather ourselves for whatever came next. As I walked through the door, Jim Savage, the rock-eating, socialist ex-head of the refinery workers’ union—also an ex-client I’d defended when he was arrested as part of Occupy Philly—gave me a crooked smile. He and Lauren Townsend, a key staffer and election veteran, were laughing and pouring whiskey, spilling a little on the rug—whatever that meant. I smiled back and went through a couple more doors until I found an empty office where I could write a few notes for a victory/concession speech, thinking I’d likely say pretty much the same thing either way, but I kept getting distracted by the laughter and noise. I changed my suit and my sweaty shirt and my tie. I was more exhausted than expectant, like a marathon runner who knew the race was finally over, whatever the clock said. For that I was grateful, as I was for all the help from people who understood how important it really was to take back power from a criminal justice system gone rogue.
I was eager to walk the block to the election night party location so I could thank old friends, thank new friends, share a few stories. We had hundreds of volunteers, many of whom I’d never met. I hoped to find some of those folks and thank them, too; it seemed the least I could do. Ben Waxman, our campaign communications chief, scratched that plan. He was another campaign veteran, having worked for years as press secretary for a respected progressive state senator. He schooled me that, for good reasons, politicians don’t go to their own election watch parties until the results are in. Going early means the press will capture your face looking angry, frustrated, doubtful, or awkward in the stressed-out and ever-changing environment of a campaign watch party. If your mostly tired, enthusiastic, and imbibing supporters act out, the media will likely get you in the shot. And then there was the other reason not to be there until the outcome was known: We might lose while the press watched…and who wants that expression memorialized forever?
That’s right: We might lose. It was certain that six of the seven candidates would. I thought about all the reasons, despite our team’s heroic efforts and the encouraging moments of the day, that we would probably lose. We started late. I had no political status. The Democratic Party had stayed out of it officially, but had its treacherous ways, as Lisa’s first campaign proved, and made no secret of its distaste for progressives and insurgent candidates like me.
Not long before my campaign announcement, the party boss was quoted in Philadelphia magazine dismissing progressives as irrelevant and unlikely to vote. We had raised a middling amount of money on our own. But we had a campaign team that was animating reluctant and unlikely voters to come out and vote, mostly because we had an exciting message for outsiders and we had exciting messengers among the activists. Our campaign was getting support from Black Philadelphians, women, and millennials. Where we canvassed, we got more than our share of white working-class and poor white voters. And we had gotten some love from well-educated white people whose knowledge of criminal justice came from The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Daily News, The New York Times. The best news was that our already effective message was amplified by the support of outside PACs during the campaign’s last three weeks. On their own, they did mailings and radio and television commercials supporting our campaign. The bad news was that the same PACs had jumped into other winning and losing chief prosecutors’ elections much earlier than they did in Philly—often six weeks before election day, according to the information I had gathered on those other candidates, rather than the three weeks here.
In the last three consecutive DA primary election cycles, about 12 percent of all voters had turned out. This dismal number for voter participation was in line with a national decline in voting over the past fifty years. Low voter turnout in Philadelphia was compounded by the fact that our 2017 Philly DA election slate included no candidate for president, governor, U.S. senator, or even Philly mayor.
The Democratic Party’s politicians had made things worse by always playing for the middle, trying to position themselves as Republican-lite, as if progressive, populist Democrats weren’t a real force in Philly. Mostly, they did so for the worst reason there is: their own incumbency. Who needs more votes you can’t predict when you already have control over the ones you can? So the Democratic Party’s leadership inadvertently squashed and alienated waves of younger voters and too many voters of color of all ages by its unwavering support of establishment candidates who did little or nothing to address these disenfranchised voters’ concerns. The Party of Incumbency was always running toward the middle, dissuading potential new voters from ever voting. Populism was a nope. Progressivism was a nope. Actually pushing racial justice was pointless in their view. What were voters of color going to do? Vote for Republicans? The unfamiliar or transformative was unacceptable.
As a judge, Lisa was still required to keep her distance from electoral politics. The judicial ethics committee’s opinions instructed that, if we somehow managed to win the primary, she could not even attend the victory party, because my campaign would be ongoing through the general election. But, if we lost, she could join the party after it became a funeral.
Because my campaign was excluding me from the election party for now, I joined Lisa and her friend at the bar of an elegant vegan restaurant, just a block from my office and a block from the election party location, to wait for the results. There were no televisions for me to watch, which I was told was partly why the place was selected. I didn’t know our sons were at the election party getting the election returns and texting Lisa information that she didn’t share with me. Expecting a long night, I figured the bar was my post for at least a few hours, good news or bad. Working off that plan, Lisa and I left the bar briefly to plug our car’s parking meter so there would be no issue later, when there was news. A car with a D.C. license plate drove past, slowed, and pulled over. The driver waved me over. When I got
close, I recognized him right away as a national Working Families Party director who had interviewed me months ago with Brandon, well before WFP brought its full support. He was smiling, excited, cryptic, and had driven a few hours for the watch party. I promised to see him at the party soon, and he drove away, beaming. Lisa said, “He’s happy. Seems like he knows something.” I didn’t allow myself to think more about what that might mean. But I knew he had made a long drive. We plugged the meter and headed back to the bar.
Less than an hour after the polls closed, and long before I expected to see anyone else, my communications wizard, Ben, showed up in the bar. He displayed no emotion but told me I should come with him to our campaign HQ. I asked him what was happening. He told me we needed to go and he would tell me more on the way. I kissed Lisa and headed out the front door. As I headed out, Ben ducked back and said a few words to Lisa that I didn’t hear.
On the walk over to HQ, Ben explained that nothing was certain but that we were looking good; victory was likely. I stopped walking. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him. I made him repeat it. He did. We walked back into campaign HQ, where several people had already left for the watch party and the people who remained were talking about heading over. Several turned and stopped talking, smiling broadly when I walked in. A cheer went up. Phones were ringing.
We would need good slogans to chant at the victory party, I thought, if there was one. Ben told me to take the phone; another candidate was calling me, possibly to concede. I answered, greeted him, and listened. Even as I replayed his rancorous claims in public forums that I was reckless and unqualified, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him in that moment as he congratulated me and accepted his defeat. A second candidate called and conceded as well. I wondered if I would have been as gracious. As I thanked each of them for their call and tried to soften the moment, it finally sank in. They were conceding. They had accepted what I hadn’t yet for fear of disappointment: We really had won.
For the People Page 25