The Most Important Election of our Lives for Criminal Justice Reform

May 4th, 2021

At the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, we don’t endorse candidates. We do believe in facts, however; and we think voters should know them before they vote. My kids claim that I have said at least four times that “this is the most important election of our lives.” That sounds about right. Elections do matter, and in retrospect some matter more than others. We think the choice of Philadelphia District Attorney between Larry Krasner and Carlos Vega is the most important election for criminal justice reform in our lifetimes. We urge you to circulate this blog post widely for Philadelphia voters:

George W. Ball, an Undersecretary of State in the 1960s, is best remembered as the single member of Kennedy’s administration against the escalation of the Vietnam War. He presciently concluded that our foreign policy of containment was outdated, and that South Vietnam could not be saved. He famously declared that “nostalgia was a seductive liar.” 

Nostalgia will do that. In its grip we idealize the past, recalling the good and smoothing over the bad, comparing the harsh reality of today to the warm glow of yesteryear. Nostalgia warps our perceptions, and narrows our focus to our own experiences. Ask nostalgic white people about their memories of the late 50s and early 60s, and see how many of them mention separate water fountains.

It behooves us to remember these effects when we contemplate who the next District Attorney of Philadelphia should be. The choice is a stark one: a reformer who came to the office from the other side of the aisle, and can be judged on his performance over the past four years (Larry Krasner), versus a former prosecutor (Carlos Vega) who spent thirty-five years in the office before being fired by Krasner in 2017. While the last few years are fresh in the voters’ minds, the history of criminal justice in the City of Brotherly Love has likely faded over time. Mr. Vega claims on his web page to have spent his years “protecting Philadelphians” and “standing up for marginalized communities.” Those assertions are hard to quantify. But his third claim - helping to overturn wrongful convictions – is borne of the criminal justice reform movement, and far easier to measure. A careful look at Mr. Vega’s record renders this claim absurd.

The concept of wrongful convictions is not a new one. The phrase itself appeared in the London Morning Chronicle in 1826, and nearly 100 years later the legendary jurist Learned Hand, noting that the American judicial system had “always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted,” referred to the notion of wrongful conviction as an “unreal dream.” But overturning wrongful convictions is a relatively new concept, and one that all true criminal justice reformers now embrace in recognition of the many DNA exonerations. We need not go back any earlier than the 2016 case of Anthony Wright to know that Carlos Vega has utter disdain for the concept. 

Anthony Wright had gone to prison for life after confessing to the 1991 rape and murder of an elderly woman named Louise Talley. It turned out there were a few problems with the conviction, however – first, when a DNA test was performed decades later, it was discovered that the sperm inside Ms. Talley was not Wright’s, but that of a small time criminal and crack addict who lived in an abandoned house nearby. In fact Wright’s DNA did not appear anywhere. Second, the detective who had taken the confession from Mr. Wright – a confession Wright always denied making – had taken the Fifth Amendment in a similar case he had investigated around the same time as the Wright case. Why would a detective claim the Fifth Amendment in a case he was investigating? That question had never troubled the old District Attorney’s Office. 

As wrongful convictions go, then, this one was a beauty – someone else’s DNA and a highly questionable confession taken by a detective who had chosen to remain silent rather than defend his own work. But this was the nostalgic golden age of Philadelphia justice, and the district attorney’s office, under the leadership of the subsequently federally convicted Seth Williams, decided to try Mr. Wright again. And this time, in 2016, Mr. Vega was on the prosecution team. Not surprisingly, the jury returned a very quick Not Guilty verdict: the foreperson of the jury said, “The evidence was so compelling for Tony that there really could have been no other verdict.”

For a prosecutor who claims to have spent his career fighting to overturn wrongful convictions, the Wright case is not a good one for the resume. Perhaps this is the reason he told The Intercept that his only participation in the case was calling civilian witnesses and crime scene personnel. “With respect to the rest of the case, I was not involved at all. It was not my case,” he said. This was an odd assertion for Mr. Vega to make, particularly since his name appeared over 900 times in the trial transcript. Odd and untrue. Mr. Vega actually called the detective who took Mr. Wright’s alleged confession to the stand, and then Vega testified in a civil deposition about the case. During that deposition he made two things clear: in his 35 years as a prosecutor he had never heard of a case where the police were suspected of fabricating or coercing a confession, or planted evidence; and that he would have gone ahead with the Wright trial even if he had known the confession had been fabricated by the police.

Such opinions apparently weren’t shared by the city, however. Mr. Wright received a 9.85 million dollar payout from his civil suit for the almost 25 years he’d spent in prison, the largest wrongful-conviction settlement in Philadelphia history. When we think about going back to the “good old days” of Philadelphia’s criminal justice system, we might want to remember the bad old days as well – and what they cost our citizens, and ourselves.