When I saw him, weeks after his AVM rupture, Ryden was locked in, unable to speak words or move his arms or legs much. He was continuing to fight to engage the world. His parents had relocated from their home in San Diego to Philadelphia for most of a year for Ryden’s rehabilitation while somehow maintaining their jobs back home and paying their bills.
About a year later, he was doing better, but he could not speak. He barely moved his face. His volitional movements were slight. But he was frequently in a chair rather than always in bed, which was good. He blinked. I saw a thumb move, apparently with purpose. It seemed that his eyes often tracked people and sometimes looked with great intensity at the person speaking. He appeared attentive when people visited, which happened a lot. The breathing tube was gone. Four surgeries later, the vascular time bomb in his brain had been defused.
Other people did better than I did; they visited him more frequently. At first, I dreaded it and was ashamed I dreaded it and didn’t know exactly why, except that the chaos and unfairness go so deep. It’s hard for me not to cry when I visit him, which I didn’t want Ryden to have to see. He is about the age of my sons, shiny with promise and talent and potential. The challenges he faces now could have been theirs. He is a victim and a survivor, like so many victims and survivors of crime. But Ryden is unlike others in having no one to blame, no one to want to catch and hold accountable. He is an innocent man unjustly locked in where he doesn’t belong, the injustice growing and mounting as time passes.
I hear his speech therapy has helped. It’s better. And his family says that they can tell when he is answering yes or no as he blinks his eyes. As I write, he still cannot speak words, but he can make sounds that indicate he agrees or disagrees. A chart of letters has been used, as is often done with people who are locked in, to allow the selection of letters to make words by a blinking code.
On our last visit with Ryden in Philly, his mom showed us photos of Ryden’s home in San Diego. The older ranch house is windowless to the street, but it hides and shelters what lies behind it: a wide, sunny grass lawn lightly sloping down toward a sitting area that looks out unobstructed, over its protective railing at the edge of a bluff, above streets and cars and houses to the limitless blue of the Pacific Ocean. I imagine Ryden there, looking outward and free to fly, like Jean-Dominique Bauby described in his biographical account of being locked in, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby wrote the book by blinking with his working eye to select each letter of the alphabet. It was Bauby’s most lasting and important work, even compared with his distinguished career as a journalist and editor.
His family tells me that Ryden blinked his eyes to spell out “Save room for me” when he was visited by some people who work daily for criminal justice reform. It’s unsurprising that would be his wish. Our movement will save room for Ryden; he remains in the good fight. He never left.
CHAPTER 17
Eleventh Hour
Second Interview at the DAO
Do things gradually
“Do it slow”
But bring more tragedy
—Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”
In 2017, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office was the busiest and biggest law firm of mostly trial lawyers in the city, at three hundred attorneys and three hundred non-lawyer staff. Every day, twenty-four hours a day, the DAO brought new criminal cases against one to two hundred people. Seeking justice in more than forty thousand new cases a year required a pile of discretionary prosecutorial decisions that no chief prosecutor could possibly make or review. The sheer volume of cases and size of big-city prosecutors’ offices enable entrenched office culture to try to eat any new reformist policy. Unless it is reined in, organizational resistance and inertia can quietly foil change, one little-noticed decision at a time. The personnel, systems, and policies matter to reformers who are going after change and pushing up against entrenched culture. After winning the May primary, I was hoping to get started early.
Because winning the May primary made our taking office the following January almost certain, we wanted to begin collaborating immediately with at least some people in the DAO on a smooth transition. That didn’t happen. My team and I made overtures to the outgoing administration. But they only invited us to meet in the DAO once, shortly before Thanksgiving. The offer was so belated, it seemed odd. I made sure to bring a witness, my future chief of staff, Arun Prabhakaran.
We were like a couple of grown-up kids walking together before our first day of classes to take a look at a new school. We made our way, excited but cautious, in a determined march at three miles an hour toward what would be our new offices in a few weeks, located directly across the street from City Hall. I joked about the first audible line of the Clash’s “Clampdown,” which is “What are we gonna do now!?” Although months of work had gone into our transition, setting priorities and making long-term plans, the truth was that we still didn’t have a lot of the basic information we needed to operate in the first few days. As we walked, Arun and I gamed out what to say and what to hold back in our meeting.
I’d been in the DA’s office many times before to meet with prosecutors on behalf of my clients, to take on the state as its antagonist to get some justice. But now, for the first time, I would enter the office as the DAO’s future boss, the DA-elect. The office looked more broken than usual even before we went inside. Plywood covered one of the building’s two giant glass windows on the sidewalk, as it had for months, obscuring the gold emblem of the DAO. Standing outside, I didn’t know whether the inside would be just as broken.
I pulled the overly heavy glass entry door wide as the wintry wind tried to hold it closed. It felt like this place was already trying to keep us out. Would it always? I went inside and saw that the escalators—which normally carried a constant stream of people to and from the DA’s office lobby—were still being rebuilt. I had known for months that new ones were being installed, but at a glacial pace only an inattentive government would accept. Maybe the problem was money or political capital in this patronage town. Or maybe it was plain old squalid dysfunction. Did rebuilding things always take so long inside the DAO?
Because the escalators were down, we had to exit the DAO lobby to a generic lobby in another part of the building. There was little signage to tell us or anyone else where to go. Everything seemed to be under construction. Helpful employees assisted us. We were guided up. But what if you were a member of the public trying to come into the DAO and weren’t the future boss? Despite the fact that the district attorney officially represented “the people,” there was nothing people-friendly in the way the office was laid out for victims, police, and other witnesses, defense attorneys and defendants, or anyone else needing to find us.
For a moment, I thought maybe the lack of information was someone’s idea of a security feature, a way to make the place impossible to navigate for an active shooter. More likely, it was just a jacked-up, slapped-together system, like the other clunky, outdated systems we suspected might be waiting for us once we managed to make our way to our new offices.
We climbed in one of several tiny elevators to ride up toward the top floor and looked at the elevator buttons. Were there two buttons for the third floor? Looking more closely, I saw the second 3 was rotated 90 degrees. Someone explained it was there to substitute for a missing “M” for mezzanine. M’s were unavailable? The DAO’s several floors were scattered throughout the building, creating a physically fractured office with who knew what other tenants’ space on floors in between. We had a walled-off piece of the lobby, the mezzanine, and the third, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and eighteenth floors of the eighteen-story building.
On the eighteenth floor, Arun and I were led past more secure doors to the chief prosecutor’s door, which presumably would soon be my new office. There was a symbol on the door’s nameplate that looked like three bases of a baseball diamond
. It meant the door was bulletproof, unlike most others throughout the office. Did the DAs who preceded me really think assassination was imminent? Did my predecessors feel more important thinking that way? Was whoever decided to build the place with a bulletproof door for the DA trying to make their bones with the boss? I wondered again if the DAO’s inscrutable signage was purposeful.
The interim DA, an appointed placeholder for Seth Williams after his forced resignation, greeted me. She was a pleasant woman I’d known years prior, before she left the DA’s office for corporate work. Unfortunately, during her short term in office, two high-level supervisors who were lifers in the office remained. They were sitting next to each other on one side of the conference table. I returned her greeting, disappointed to see the other two seated there.
These were men I knew and regarded as unrepentant zealots, standard-bearers for everything broken that I was trying to fix. Their names had been raised dozens of times by people who worked in criminal justice who said their immediately leaving the office was crucial to achieving culture change. One was dressed in a black shirt with a dark tie: funeral attire, which was understandable. The other was peering through small glasses perched on his sharp nose. As I walked into the office and saw them seated, they looked like a couple of dug-in ticks, or maybe coiled snakes. We could have shared how we felt about criminal justice with each other, but it wouldn’t have been good.
The one with the small glasses had already publicly expressed his views on criminal justice reform at the interim DA’s swearing-in ceremony a few months before, a couple of months after I had won the primary, at a time when everyone knew I would become the next DA. Out of respect for the interim DA, I attended and sat in the audience, toward the front of the large courtroom where her swearing-in took place. I was unsure what to expect but still hoping at that point that she would assist in a cooperative transition during the remaining months. The paper program for the swearing-in ceremony said Mr. Small Glasses would be the primary speaker, a very bad sign. When his turn came to speak, he admitted that there were voices claiming prosecutors and prosecution were off course. Then he summarily dismissed them: “The ship doesn’t need to be righted.” Perhaps he couldn’t resist a last-gasp throwdown in a room mostly full of his partisans, people he supervised. Or maybe he wanted to resign with a flourish. To me, it sounded like the old guard’s death rattle.
The other one sitting at the table—the one in black—was the architect of what I saw as the office’s toxic culture of shrill opposition to nearly everything and everyone that challenged the DAO in appellate and post-trial matters, regardless of merit. I called him “Dr. No.” What offended me wasn’t just that the positions he took were so universally adversarial and frequently divorced from my opinion of what it meant to seek justice. I was also bothered by his and his minions’ bullying, vilifying rants aimed at defendants, at defense lawyers, and at trial judges who dared to disagree with the DAO’s positions. That kind of writing was short on law and facts, but long on sensationalism and meanness, an opinion shared with me by several practitioners and judges.
As I stood by the conference room table where they sat, I passed on discussing our differences. We exchanged curt pleasantries. I quickly took in my future office. The office was a big, plain, high-ceilinged shoebox containing what looked like a desk and a conference table bearing seals of the city. The city seals were roughly inlaid in soft wood, coated in shiny marine varnish that glared in the sun. The furniture that bore them reminded me of a careful high schooler’s project from shop class in the 1970s. I had seen similar work in the lobby of the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, Pennsylvania, during my defense attorney days while waiting to visit clients in prison. Careful work, mediocre tools, cheap materials, and approximate dimensions. The desk appeared too short, which made me smile. Perhaps some inmate carpenter knew the desk was for a chief prosecutor and had gotten his revenge?
There was also an enormous freestanding trophy case with empty glass shelves spacious enough to serve as a three-layer bunk bed on a submarine. It contained a few mementos of the interim DA’s speaking engagements and other events that occupied her days during the few months since she was appointed. The prior DA’s undoubtedly larger collection must have been cleared out when he resigned. The glass behemoth sat directly in between windows that looked out to the statue of William Penn, high atop City Hall. I walked over to one of them. Even from what would soon be my eighteenth-floor window, I had to look up to see the statue fully. Then I looked down to see if I could spot Frank’s statue, but City Hall blocked the view north of the ground-level bronze Rizzo. I couldn’t wave at him or flip him the bird. At least not from here. And at least not while the interim DA was watching.
As the meeting began, I thought about some of the other prosecutors who had occupied it. Its last occupant, Seth Williams, was already sentenced to five years in federal prison. I thought about Seth’s predecessor, Lynne Abraham. She signed countless documents here while doting on the pet cats she housed in the office (reportedly their names were Miss Demeanor and Amicus Curiae). I wondered if, during her reign, shipments of cat litter and cat food showed up periodically while her excited cats walked across the desk she used hundreds of times to sign off on seeking the death penalty.
As the meeting continued, the basic documents provided, like employee directories and organizational charts, were obviously out of date. Arun and I didn’t say much, given the meeting’s belated timing, given who attended and what their presence said, and given the apparently useless materials provided. We perceived no real effort to help and wanted to keep our short-term plans close. We didn’t want to share our real concerns. We made and they agreed to a few non-controversial asks. We thanked them for their time and left.
My second interview at the DAO was over, except this time I had already been hired for the job that at least two of the DAO employees in that room didn’t want me to have. The voters hired me; I stood no chance with those two. And this time the DAO employees were the ones whose future employment was uncertain.
We left the interim DA’s office and took a quick tour. I noticed that shredders were prevalent as we looked around, including a high-volume one as big as a small car. It was disturbing. We took the elevators down and exited. This time, no one would have wanted a cartoon of my exiting the building. It would have shown me walking out the door rather than flying and hitting the sidewalk, papers (albeit useless ones) under control rather than fluttering around me. Nothing funny there.
For years, I had seen plaques hanging on the walls in the DAO’s main elevator bay that named several years’ “best prosecutor.” The prominent location guaranteed what the DAO leadership wanted when they gave out the awards—that hundreds of employees would repeatedly see them and follow their example. It was my opinion when I visited that the plaques meant the leadership was deliberately modeling attorneys who won at all cost. Mostly the plaques recast infamy as glory, naming some of the most ruthless and unethical trial lawyers. In the Homicide Unit, a prep room was named after the infamous prosecutor Roger King, who posted on his office walls the arrest photos of defendants whose death sentences he had achieved, marked with an “X” or a diagonal line through their faces. They were paper trophies from the hunt. His tactics in and out of the courtroom were outrageous. And the convictions and death sentences he obtained were frequently reversed, requiring a retrial where that was even possible.
Prosecutors like that were exactly the ones we had to turn out, the ones whose worst work we had to undo, and whose dirty secrets we had to explore to arrive at justice in the office we would soon be entering. If these prosecutors had committed ethics violations, constitutional violations, or even crimes to convict the innocent, the proof was in that office, and we had to make sure the proof was not destroyed before our administration began its work.
I took no delight in the idea of firing anyone once I was in office. It was w
aking me up some nights. But 150,000 people had elected a movement that promised reform. If I kept all the old guard around, they would be sure to break the promises my team and I had made. They’d just wait us out—patronizing us to our faces while undermining us daily. We meant to keep our promises. We could not allow them to make us fail.
Given the chance, most of the people I was thinking of discharging would have fired me on day one, without hesitation. Soon enough we would be in office and I would have to finalize the plan for letting go personnel who couldn’t help but undermine the office’s new platform. We would have to do it all as humanely as circumstances allowed. Mostly I wanted them to be able to move on, preferably to work in a field of law where less was at stake than in prosecution.
Some Philly prosecutors I had gotten to know during my thirty-year career as a defense attorney were as unscrupulous as a prosecutor gets—Dirty Harry in a lawyer’s suit—who cared only about winning convictions and maximizing sentences by whatever means. I viewed them as bullies and cheats who were drawn to the position for the same reason dirty cops are drawn to theirs—they find power exciting, and unchecked power even more so. It was their turn to accept responsibility for what they had done. I knew a few of them would lie in wait for me and retaliate whether I separated them or let them stay, because treachery and retribution were in their nature. That danger was real. Many were connected; many had resources.
Others were more professional but were so philosophically opposed to our mission and so impossible to rein in that they would hurt us daily as long as they were on-site. I knew they would have to go once I was in office. Their gravitas and dominant personalities gave them unmerited influence over other employees.
For the People Page 28