Update: May 17

Larry Krasner won the Democratic nomination to Philadelphia’s DA office with 38 percent of the votes. He will face Republican candidate Beth Grossman in the general election next fall, but in a deeply Democratic city, the odds are in his favor.

Philadelphians are heading to the polls today to pick a Democratic candidate for the city’s top prosecutor job. Turnout will almost certainly be low, but many in the city and beyond are looking at this election as a referendum on the criminal justice system at large, and a vote that could send ripple effects across the country and bring greater scrutiny on prosecutors, the system’s most powerful and unchecked actors.

As The Intercept reported yesterday, the field is crowded, and the city’s justice problems run deep: Philadelphia jails more people than any other city in the Northeast, and broken practices like stop-and-frisk, cash bail, and asset forfeiture are rampant and disproportionately impact the city’s poor and black citizens.

But an unconventional candidate has shaken up this race: a criminal defense and civil rights attorney who has never prosecuted a case but instead spent his career defending poor people and protesters and suing the police. The Intercept met with Larry Krasner ahead of the primary to discuss his opposition to the death penalty, what “smart on crime” really means, and how prosecutors nationwide can stand up to the Trump administration.

Alice Speri: You have been a defense attorney your entire career. Why do you want to become a prosecutor now?

Larry Krasner: I’m running now because I think the time is right. People are understanding something that I have understood for a while, just because I am in criminal courts four, five days a week and I have been seeing it for 30 years. What they’re seeing is that the criminal justice system systemically picks on poor people, and those people, at least in Philadelphia, are overwhelmingly black and brown people.

The situation has gotten urgent. When you have more people in jail than any country in the world, that’s a problem. When you have more people of color in jail than South Africa had during apartheid, that’s a problem. When you have the most incarcerated city of the 10 largest cities in the United States, that’s a problem. When you have more people doing life sentences whose homicides were committed as juveniles than any state in the country and any country in the world, that’s a problem. We have gotten to the point where it should be pretty obvious something has to change, right?

When I looked at the candidates who were in the field, I was looking at people I knew, and it was business as usual. If there had been a truly progressive candidate in there, I would not have run. At this point, it just seemed necessary, to be honest.

AS: You have made resisting the Trump administration a cornerstone of your campaign. How can DAs do that?

LK: The good news is that the feds don’t have enough law enforcement officers. They have jurisdiction over certain things like drugs and guns, but they still need to have boots on the ground. If they’re going to try to go back to a war on drugs that has failed so miserably, they’ll have a hard time doing it in places where local prosecutors aren’t willing to do it for them. I am not willing to help ICE with mass deportations. I am not willing to help the DEA or the FBI return to the mentality of the war on drugs. Of course I would engage in what I view to be appropriate drug enforcement, but that doesn’t look like the war on drugs. If local district attorneys simply stand up and say, “You go ahead, we’re not going to be a part of your plan. We’re not funded for it, we’re not required to do it,” he will have great difficulty carrying out almost all of what he’s trying to do.

AS: You said you want to transform the culture of the DA’s office. How do you do that when prosecutors wield enormous power and have long acted without oversight or accountability, often driven by a convict-at-all-costs mentality?

LK: People are doing things in that office pretty much because that’s how they’ve always done it. In fact, one of the more laughable things about being in court all the time is how you see some good defense attorney or public defender making a legal argument and the response coming from the DA is, “But judge, that’s how we always do it.” Which needless to say is not a legal response. That’s just the systemic familiarity response.

If you have a truly progressive DA, there’s going to be a certain portion of the DA’s office who can’t stand the idea of change. They’re going to leave. There are other people who are going to be made to leave because you cannot bring about real change and leave people in place who are going to fight change every step of the way. The ones who will leave will tend to be my generation, people who started in this business 30 years ago, which means they’ll also tend to be white and male. That results in more openings, opportunities for greater diversity, and if we are to judge by what’s happened in other jurisdictions, the office will become a tremendous magnet for new talent, because there are a ton of people who are either coming out of law school or who are mid-career who would love to work in a truly progressive DA’s office but haven’t been able to find any.

That means you have really committed, dedicated, talented people who are coming into an organization that already contains the dissent, meaning people who have been there for years but might have been frustrated for years. I know some of these folks because some of them would call me and tell me what they knew about corrupt cops, but couldn’t do anything about it from the inside. Those people need to stay, and in supervisor positions, because they represent the kind of change that should come. And there are a lot of just malleable, mostly younger attorneys who did what they were told, and always wanted to do the right thing, and with proper training will do the right thing. I think real cultural change is possible.

AS: Prosecutorial misconduct is a major problem in many DA offices, and it’s hardly ever confronted.

LK: Prosecutors who engage in misconduct or can be shown to have done it in the past are not going to be working for me. Let’s remember something. DAs go into court every day and there are certain mantras they repeat. One of those mantras is, “Well, you should have thought of that before you did what you did.” Another one is, “You need to take responsibility for your actions.” Right? Well, it goes for them too.