The Pennsylvania Supreme Court stepped in after finding serious problems in how Philadelphia’s District Attorney office handled post-conviction concessions, sending a high-profile murder case back for further review and ordering new oversight so the state attorney general can be notified and permitted to intervene when the DA concedes relief in serious cases.
<pA divided high court issued a 4-3 decision that reversed a judge’s order granting a new trial to Levar Brown after the Philadelphia DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit conceded the conviction should not stand. Justice Kevin Dougherty wrote the opinion and flagged broader reliability problems beyond a single case, saying the court could not ignore patterns that put victims and public safety at risk.
The court instructed that judges handling post-conviction challenges must notify the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General and allow the office to intervene before granting relief in any case where the Philadelphia DA’s office concedes that a conviction should be overturned. This is not a seizure of local prosecutorial power, the majority said, but a required adversarial check to prevent fragile or flawed concessions from undoing convictions without proper scrutiny.
“The prosecutor does not decide whether a defendant is entitled to relief under the Post Conviction Relief Act,” Dougherty wrote for the majority, stressing that judges must independently evaluate whether relief is warranted even when prosecutors agree with the defense. The majority found Krasner’s office’s concession in Brown’s case “was not reliable” and listed multiple failures that undermined the plea to overturn the conviction.
The opinion catalogued serious procedural and ethical lapses: conceding relief without support in the record, withholding material evidence from the court, submitting a false stipulation of fact, misstating facts in pleadings, failing to conduct a reasonable investigation and opposing a required evidentiary hearing. The court said these were not isolated mistakes limited to one file but signs of a pattern in post-conviction work that demanded a court-ordered fix.
Since 2018, the office has conceded relief “well over 100 times,” mostly in murder cases, and the opinion noted there are apparently more than 1,000 cases still waiting to be reviewed by the Conviction Integrity Unit. Families of murder victims brought the appeal, pointing out that Brown had been convicted in separate juries in 2004 and 2005 for two killings, and that decades-old convictions deserve careful, exhausted review before being undone.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday welcomed the ruling and framed his office’s role in plain terms: “As prosecutors, our role is to advocate for victims of crime, for public safety, and for justice,” Sunday said in a statement. The AG’s office will now be positioned to provide an independent review in cases where a county prosecutor seeks to concede relief, an arrangement the majority says will enhance reliability without stripping local discretion.
Krasner pushed back publicly, posting a video that cast his reform agenda as part of a wide social justice movement and blasted the decision as unfair to Philadelphia. “Reform can be scary to those who need it,” Krasner said in the video, adding “Which part don’t you like? The safety or the freedom?” He went on to argue that the decision makes Philadelphia unique: “we need to have the attorney general’s office looking over our shoulder unlike every other county.” Krasner asked rhetorically, “Does that help democracy? No” and warned it “actually undermines the value of a vote in Philadelphia as compared to every other county.”
The high court’s majority rejected the notion that inviting the AG in would neuter DA discretion and said courts benefit from an adversarial process before a conviction is set aside. In dissent, Justice David Wecht warned that routing local post-conviction disputes through the attorney general risks intrusion into the work of Philadelphia’s elected prosecutor, but the majority counters that the change simply adds a layer of independent review for the most consequential concessions.
The decision sends Brown’s case back to the Pennsylvania post-conviction court for further proceedings under the new rule and lays out a process for future cases where the Philadelphia DA seeks to concede relief. The message from the majority is clear: when an office repeatedly seeks to overturn convictions in serious cases, courts must insist on reliable, adversarial review so victims, communities, and the integrity of convictions are protected.
