Civil rights attorney Larry Krasner’s convincing victory in last week’s Democratic primary election for Philadelphia district attorney took many members of the media and the voting public by surprise. Krasner, who has no prosecutorial experience and has a history of taking on the police, won by nearly 18 points in a competitive race and will face Republican nominee Beth Grossman in the November general election.

Krasner intends to “fundamentally change” the culture in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, which he has said prioritizes conviction rates and harsh sentencing over the crime-reduction approaches he plans to take. To find out what his win could mean for the city, DrexelNow caught up with Anil Kalhan, JD, associate professor of law in Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law.

Q: What does Larry Krasner’s victory in the primary election indicate about the direction of criminal justice in the city?

A: The prevailing narrative in the media about Krasner's primary election victory has been somewhat oversimplified and misleading. There's no question that Philadelphia's primary election voters signaled a desire to move away from the "tough on crime" excesses of the past few decades. But the campaign was already trending in the direction of progressive reform even before Krasner announced he was running — he was one of the very last candidates to enter the race, and to a considerable extent the other candidates held the same positions on those substantive issues as he did.

Wh

Q: Krasner’s platform was built on advocacy for a number of specific reforms to the criminal justice system, including the end of the death penalty, cash bail, civil forfeiture and stop-and-frisk, as well as treating addiction as a medical problem rather than a criminal one. If he goes on to win November’s general election, how much power would he have as district attorney to implement these changes?

A: The district attorney plays an important role in all of those matters, although none of these reforms are matters that the district attorney can implement entirely on his or her own. If Krasner wins the general election, a key question therefore will be whether other actors in the criminal justice system, including judges and the police, will successfully be pushed to move in similar reform-minded directions. Krasner's professional background and his rhetoric during the campaign could cause him to face headwinds on his reform agenda from some of those actors, and even from within the District Attorney's Office itself.

On the other hand, if he approaches the task of leading the office carefully and skillfully, he may be able to overcome any wariness that some career prosecutors and others might have, and having effectively energized progressive groups in support of his campaign, he could be well positioned to use the District Attorney's Office as a bully pulpit to draw public attention to the need for other actors in the criminal justice system more generally to embrace reform.

Q: The race in Philadelphia came in the early days of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tough-on-crime administration that some have said will resume the war on drugs. Does it tell us anything about how big cities may push back over the next four years?

答: