It’s Always Christmas in the DA’s Office
August 12th, 2016
We’ve been feeling a little slighted at ACCR these past few days. It being summer and vacation time, we took a few days off – but for some reason we can’t fathom, none of our friends stepped forward to pay for our flights. Not only that, we’ve been footing the bill for Eagles and Sixers and Phillies tickets – why aren’t our supporters offering us free seats? When our roof leaks, we have to pay to have it repaired ourselves! And then, of course, there’s the cash – why aren’t people walking up to us to hand us some hard currency, for god’s sake??
But Seth Williams, the top prosecutor in Philadelphia, doesn’t have these problems. He’s been taking free trips with free lodging, getting his roof fixed “on the house” (rather than the $45,000 it costs non-District Attorneys), standing on the sidelines of sporting events, and getting gifts that are the color of money. If he forgot to tell anyone about it, “he wasn’t paying attention,” his lawyer said. Well, a leaky roof can really be a distraction.
Under the “anything’s possible” column, maybe Williams is just an extraordinarily terrific fellow, and when he goes online to take a flight, an alert goes out to his buddies to make sure he doesn’t actually have to pay for the trip himself! Indeed, his security detail, who surely make less than his $175,000 salary, gave him $800 in cash for Christmas. But while ACCR believes more than most in the presumption that one is innocent until proven guilty, we also have to acknowledge another explanation: the people providing all this largess expect something in return. Two of the main gift-givers, in fact, were defense attorneys handling cases prosecuted by Williams’ office, and one became a judge subsequent to Williams’ endorsement. The Eagles, who apparently like to provide free sideline passes to important Philadelphia officials, were fortunate enough not to have two of its star players prosecuted after a DA investigation.
Nor is it really plausible that Mr. Williams wasn’t paying attention. Not too long ago, his office successfully prosecuted five state legislators and local officials for taking gifts much smaller than those Mr. Williams has himself admitted to receiving. Certainly an elected official, no less the top prosecutor in Philadelphia, is acutely aware of the ethical and legal standards to which he must be held.
But what does all this have to do with the death penalty? We think a lot. For starters, Williams has bucked the national trend to seek the ultimate punishment infrequently – while Philadelphia is surely pursuing the death penalty less often than it used to, it still does so more than virtually every other major city, even though no death sentence has been returned in more than three years. Perhaps more importantly, Williams continues to ignore the very real regional shift away from capital punishment – every state in the Northeast except New Hampshire (which has one person on its death row) has now done away with it. Of course, it is still the law of Pennsylvania that a District Attorney can attempt to impose a death sentence, even though Governor Wolf has rightly suspended executions pending a full evaluation of an obviously flawed system. But if capital punishment is sought, we would at the very least hope that the decision to do so was being made by a prosecutor following the most rigorous ethical and legal principles. Is there any question that Mr. Williams’ behavior has fallen well beneath such standards?