Shame Of The City: Rufus Seth Williams, Our Lawless D.A.

D.A. Announces He Won't Run Again AP/Matt Rourke

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

Last week, R. Seth Williams, our beleaguered district attorney, gave a brief defense of his time in office as the city's top prosecutor.

"Look, I've made some mistakes," Williams told Inquirer political columnist Chris Brennan. But "I was a great D.A. in terms of what we did internally" to change how the office operates.

Allow me to advance an alternative thesis: Williams did institute some far-reaching changes at the D.A.'s office, but it wasn't for the better. With three big decisions during his eight-year tenure, Williams stepped into the middle of public controversies and placed his own personal political ambitions above the law, with disastrous consequences.

The sins of Seth Williams have put innocent men in jail, and allowed 852 convicted drug dealers and hundreds of domestic abusers and other criminals to go free. The sins of Seth Williams have perverted truth and justice, wreaked havoc upon the citizens he was sworn to protect, and will ultimately cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Round One -- the Archdiocese of Philadelphia

Let's start with Williams' alleged biggest accomplishment as D.A., the prosecution of Msgr. William J. Lynn for endangering the welfare of a child.

In this case, Williams was following groundbreaking work done by his predecessor in office, former District Attorney Lynne Abraham, and a 2005 grand jury report she oversaw on sex abuse committed by priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

The 2005 grand jury report enraged the city by documenting the sins of 63 priests who had raped and molested hundreds of innocent children. But because of a successful coverup masterminded over decades by two former archbishops, Anthony Bevilacqua and John Krol, all those guilty priests escaped punishment because their covered up crimes didn't fall within the statute of limitations.

While others saw a tragedy in the shame of the Catholic Church, Seth Williams the former altar boy saw a political opportunity to exploit.

If he could put a member of the Catholic hierarchy in jail for the coverup, Williams figured, he could be elected mayor or governor. So he targeted Msgr. William J. Lynn, Cardinal  Bevilacqua's yes-man who as the archdiocese's secretary for clergy from 1992 to 2004, was responsible for overseeing abusive priests.

But there were two problems with the prosecution of Msgr. Lynn. First, the state's original 1972 child endangerment law applied only to people who had direct contact with children, such as parents, guardians and teachers. It did not apply to supervisors, such as Msgr. Lynn, who was a supervisor of priests, but had no direct contact with children.

Lynne Abraham and a grand jury had openly stated this in the 2005 grand jury report, to explain why they couldn't charge Msgr. Lynn and other officials in the archdiocese, including Cardinal Bevilacqua, with child endangerment. Then, D.A. Abraham led a state-wide campaign to reform the child endangerment law so that it would include supervisors such as Lynn. The state legislature complied by amending the law in 2007 to include supervisors.

So what did D.A. Williams do? He said when political expediency is concerned, the law be damned. And he went ahead and indicted Msgr. Lynn anyway for endangering the welfare of a child under a law that clearly didn't apply to him.

To do that, the D.A. had to ignore the written conclusions of D.A. Abraham and the 2005 grand jury report, as well as the actions of the state Legislature, which had amended the child endangerment law to include supervisors. And the D.A. did it without ever explaining the complete about-face.

The D.A.'s second problem with the Msgr. Lynn prosecution was that he needed a victim whose crime fell within the statute of limitations, so he could prosecute the monsignor for endangering the welfare of a child by exposing him to an abusive priest. Seth Williams found his victim in Danny Gallagher, AKA Billy Doe.

To make prosecutorial history, the D.A. didn't care whether Gallagher, a mentally unstable heroin addict, made up a patently ridiculous tale about a series of violent rapes, with endless factual inconsistencies and blatant contradictions. It was a series of fables that contradicted the usual pattern of sexual abuse, as documented in 45,000 pages of the archdiocese's secret archive files, a once secret history of sexual abuse by the clergy pried loose from an archdiocese safe by multiple subpoenas from D.A. Abraham's office.

Missing from Danny Gallagher's fables was the usual pattern of sex abuse in the archdiocese. There was no "grooming" of the victim by abusers showering little Danny Gallagher the innocent altar boy with presents, attention, etc. In Gallagher's made-up stories, he and his family barely knew his attackers, and their vicious assaults came out of nowhere.

Another contrast between the secret history of sex abuse in the archdiocese and the fables told by Danny Gallager was flagged early on by Jack Rossiter, a former FBI agent hired by the archdiocese to investigate claims of sex abuse. The alleged abusers in the Billy Doe case barely knew each other. Yet, according to the story line advanced by Gallagher and the D.A., the abusers somehow trusted each other enough in a sinister conspiracy to pass around a child rape victim, Billy Doe, like a piñata. As Rossiter told the archdiocese, he had never seen this happen in sex abuse cases with two abusers, let alone three.

More proof that Danny Gallagher was a fraud: for a year his file gathered dust at the D.A.'s office while Abraham was still the incumbent. At a time when Abraham and her staff were scouring the Commonwealth for a victim whose abuse fell within the statute of limitations, so they could prosecute top church officials. The only reason that Gallagher's complaint wasn't thrown in the trash while Abraham was D.A., I am told, was because Gallagher's father had political pull because he was a Philadelphia police sergeant.

To make the Billy Doe story work, the D.A. had to publish a grand jury report in 2011 that ran with the uncorroborated accusations and wild stories of Danny Gallagher, and Mark Bukowski, another bogus victim with huge credibility problems. Nearly two years later, when the D.A.'s detectives finally got around to investigating those claims, they discovered that none of it was true.

To make the Billy Doe story work, the D.A.'s office in that 2011 grand jury report also had to rewrite grand jury witness testimony to conform to bogus story lines.

All you have to do is compare the two jury reports to see what happened in the D.A.'s office. Under  Lynne Abraham, the D.A.'s office did its investigating before it wrote the 2005 grand jury report. And the report that was factually checked and double checked by Abraham's staff of senior prosecutors withstood the scrutiny of a team of lawyers hired by the archdiocese to refute it. The critics of that 2005 grand jury report never found a single factual mistake that I am aware of.

But the 2011 grand jury put out by Seth Williams, where they wrote the report first and did the investigating two years later, was so shoddy that this blogger found more than 20 factual mistakes in it. Mistakes that the office of Seth Williams has for five straight years refused to explain or correct.

Seth Williams was right, however, about his political calculations. After he hung the monsignor out to dry, with the full cooperation of a gullible press, Williams was the subject of fawning national  media coverage for being the first prosecutor in the country to lock up a member of the Catholic hierarchy  for covering up sex abuse by the clergy.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times hailed Williams, raised Catholic, as the "avenging altar boy." Meanwhile, Sabrina Rubin Erdely described Billy Doe in Rolling Stone as "a sweet, gentle kid with boyish good looks" before she turned her attention to another alleged victim of gang rape named Jackie.

What were the consequences of Seth Williams' lawless actions? Three priests and a Catholic school teacher were sent to jail for imaginary crimes, and one of those priests died there. After an appeals court twice overturned Msgr. Lynn's conviction, D.A. Williams still insists on retrying the case, even though Msgr. Lynn has served 33 of 36 months of his mandatory sentence, plus 18 months of house arrest. The retrial is scheduled for May.

But the whole case is crumbling. Last month,  Joe Walsh, the former lead detective in the Billy Doe case, testified on behalf of the defendants in the D.A.'s witch hunt.

Walsh explained to a Common Pleas Court judge how he repeatedly told a prosecutor in the case, former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, about all the factual inconsistencies he had found, and how his investigation had repeatedly revealed that Danny Gallagher was a liar.

But Sorensen, according to Walsh, refused to do anything about it, saying, "You're killing my case."

That's on Seth, the sins of his so-called signature accomplishment, his self-described "historic" prosecution of the church. And when it came time for the D.A. to refute Detective Walsh's words by putting former ADA Mariana Sorensen on the witness stand last month, she was nowhere to be found.

Round Two --- Being "Smart On Crime"

The next big crime committed by D.A. Williams occurred when he decided he was going to capitalize on publicity over his predecessor in office's low conviction rate by being "smart on crime."

Once again, Williams was stepping into a public controversy to exploit it. The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2009 had run a front-page four-part series on the administration of his predecessor, Lynne Abraham, entitled "Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied."

The series found that Philadelphia defendants went free in two-thirds of violent crime cases. Thousands of crimes were dismissed because prosecutors weren't prepared or witnesses didn't show up in court. Among large urban counties, the newspaper found, Philadelphia had the lowest felony conviction rate. So Seth Williams proclaimed that his new administration was going to be "smart on crime."

That meant, as the D.A. explained to The New York Times in 2010, fewer prosecutions but a higher conviction rate based on a computer analysis of past prosecution efforts.

"We need to be smarter on crime instead of just talking tough," the D.A. told the Times.

 But the hidden side of being smart on crime, the cops will tell you, was that under Seth Williams, the assistant district attorneys in his charging unit were only interested in charging cases that were slam dunks. So that Seth Williams could show voters a lower crime rate and a higher conviction rate.

To be smart on crime, however, the D.A.'s office had to ignore cases of domestic violence where the victim was often too terrified to make a statement or cooperate as a witness. Because those cases inevitably involved a he-said she-said dispute that could translate into a loss in court. Which would be bad for the D.A.'s conviction rate.

 So this D.A., for political gain, stopped charging attackers in domestic assaults. Even though state law said that when the cops witnessed injuries in a domestic violence case and knew who did it, they were supposed to arrest the guilty party so the D.A.'s office could charge the suspect. When dealing with a non-cooperative victim, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could act as the complainant to protect victims, punish the guilty, and hopefully to prevent repeat offenses.

For years,  however, the D.A.'s office has refused to prosecute domestic violence cases where victims had declined to cooperate, often out of fear for their lives.

For the past week, nine such cases of domestic abuse have been documented on this blog. Cases where victims were shot, stabbed, beaten, and choked unto unconsciousness. In one case, an attacker tore out "a chunk of hair" from a victim's head, and the cops found both the attacker as well as the evidence, as in the missing chunk of hair. In each of these nine cases, however, the D.A.'s office refused to follow state law and protect victims by charging the guilty. All the accused attackers got away no matter what they did.

But that pattern of lawlessness by the D.A.'s office under Seth Williams supposedly came to an end last week when Deputy District Attorney Michael Barry sent out an email to police, trumpeting a new policy directive in domestic violence cases.

In his email, Barry told police he was issuing his new policy directive so he could put the ADAs in the charging unit in a position where "they feel more comfortable charging difficult cases" and actually follow the law.

But domestic violence isn't the only crime being undercharged by our D.A. After domestic violence, the next biggest category where the D.A's office doesn't feel comfortable charging suspects is so-called "stranger robberies" where the victim doesn't know the perpetrator.

Such as on last Dec. 23rd, when an assailant grabbed a woman from behind, as she was getting out of her parked car on the 1200 block of Taylor Street, and "forced her against her car."

The attacker was a man who pressed a sharp object against the victim's ribs and threatened to stab her, before he pushed her to the ground and ran off with the victim's Michael Kors pocketbook. The Fire Department wound up taking the victim to the emergency room at Jefferson University Hospital, where she was treated for a "minor head injury."

Five days later, the woman was driving when she saw a man who looked like her attacker following two other women. The guy saw her, made an abrupt turn and tried to get away. But the woman was so determined she made a U-turn and followed the man to 25th and Mifflin, where she pulled over and called 9l1.

When the police arrived, they apprehended the guy and the woman who was the victim of the previous robbery "positively identified" the suspect as her attacker, according to police records. The suspect was arrested and declined to give a statement.

But when the cops sent over to the D.A.'s office an affidavit of probable cause, the D.A. declined to charge the suspect, citing "insufficient corroboration." A search warrant was executed at the suspect's home, an ADA wrote, and no evidence was found. Apparently the would-be robber was smart enough to toss the pocketbook on his way home.

The positive ID made by the woman who was the victim of the earlier robbery wasn't good enough as far as the D.A.'s office was concerned. When it comes to a robbery by a stranger, "absent other corroboration, we are hesitant to charge," explained Deputy District Attorney Michael Barry. "It's tough."

Hey Mike, is that tough on the D.A.'s office or is that tough on crime victims?

A decision not to charge a suspect in a so-called stranger robbery can have deadly consequences.

As recounted in Newsweek, on Aug. 26,. 2015, police arrested 19-year-old Samir Price of Philadelphia after he was positively identified as a perpetrator by the victim of an attempted carjacking. 

Police, responding to a call of a robbery in progress, apprehended Price just two blocks away, 30 minutes after the crime. When Price was taken into custody, the cops found a Smith and Wesson BB gun in his backpack. 

But the district attorney declined to prosecute the case because of “insufficient corroboration,” citing an “uncorroborated stranger robbery with nothing else.” So Price was set free.

  

Sixteen months later, on Dec. 7^th,  police arrested Price and charged him with murder and robbery in the Nov. 28th ambush shooting death of Ian Wilsey, a 14-year-old ninth-grader at Northeast High School in Philadelphia.

The victim was shot three times; one bullet pierced his heart. If the D.A. had pressed charges against Price for carjacking, the cops say, Price would have been in jail and Wilsey would still be alive.

Round Three: The Narcotics Field Unit South

In this episode, Seth Williams once again found a public controversy to exploit, only this time it was one of his own making.

In the years leading up to this mess, Seth Williams and his office had been involved in a pissing match with members of the Philadelphia Police Department's Narcotics Field Unit South. The D.A. had its own narcotics unit charged with busting drug dealers. But so did the Philadelphia cops and their Narcotics Field Unit South was kicking the D.A.'s ass when it came to high-profile drug arrests.

Because the D.A. was losing the battle of the narcs, time and time again, his office was losing out on drug forfeiture money, as well as publicity over big-time drug busts.

So what did Seth Williams do? First, he refused to allow the members of the Narcotics Field Unit South to sit on "proffer" sessions with the D.A.'s office. Proffer sessions were interviews where assistant district attorneys sat down with drug dealers under arrest, and sought to turn those drug dealers into cooperating witnesses, so they could go out and arrest more drug dealers hopefully higher up on the food chain.

The breaking point in the petty feud between the D.A. and the Narcotics Field Unit South came over the busts of a couple of high-profile drug dealers.

On Jan. 17, 2012, the Narcotics Field Unit tailed a suspected drug dealer to a garage, where they confiscated 53 pounds of hydroponic marijuana with a street value of $481,240.

When the cops interviewed the suspect, Mohammed Samhan, 26, of Los Angeles, he decided to cooperate and give up another marijuana dealer. The cops subsequently raided the home of Kit "Fatboy" Poon, 41, of Northeast Philadelphia. This time, they confiscated 172 pounds of hydroponic marijuana with a street value of $1,565,420.

Faced with serious jail time, Poon decided that he too wanted to cooperate. He told the cops he knew about an even bigger future marijuana shipment due to arrive by tractor-trailer.

But what did the D.A.'s office do under Seth Williams? They cut the Narcotics Field Unit out of the proffer sessions. And when the narcotics officers and their supervisor protested, Seth Williams decided basically to get rid of them.

How did he do it? Once again the law, due process and the truth meant nothing to Seth Williams. He wrote a two-paragraph letter to the police commissioner in 2012 where he stated that he would no longer prosecute any drug busts that involved five members of the Narcotics Field Unit South, and their supervisor, because Seth didn't trust the cops. With that letter, the D.A. effectively put the narcs out of business. Even though, court records show, First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann, Seth's number 2 guy, when pressed by the public defender's office, twice had to admit that the D.A.'s office didn't have one scrap of evidence of police misconduct when Seth William wrote the letter that put the narcs out of business.

To make sure he would destroy the careers of those narcotics officers, Williams, according to court papers in a defamation suit filed by the cops, leaked that letter two days later to Fox 29 through Tasha Jamerson, then the D.A.'s spokesperson. Jamerson, a former Fox 29 reporter, was married to the managing editor at Fox 29.

So the career of the most effective narcotics squad in the history of the city went up in smoke, thanks to the reckless and irresponsible conduct of Seth Williams.

"They were taking millions of dollars of poison off the streets," Lt. Robert Otto, who oversaw the unit, testified on April 30, 2015 in federal court. In just 2011 alone, according to police statistics, the unit seized 357 guns, $7 million worth of drugs and $1.8 million in cash.

But our D.A. not only wanted to put the narcs out of business, he also decided to overturn the convictions of 852 drug dealers that had been previously arrested by the Narcotics Field Unit. All those drug dealers went free, including Mohammed and the Fatboy, who had been caught red-handed with more than 200 pounds of marijuana worth more than $2 million.

"They were one of the best outfits in the city," FOP President Joh McNesby said about the Narcotics Field Unit South. "I think the D.A.'s office sold the feds a line of shit and none of it was true."

At the federal trial of the narcotics officers, all six were acquitted on all 47 charges of a 26-count RICO indictment that alleged systematic beating and robbing of drug dealers. In a trial where the prosecution case amounted to "absolutely nothing," the jury foreman said. 

"It almost got to the point where you almost wanted to make jokes about it," the jury foreman said. When it came time to deliberate, "I could have been out of there in 10 minutes. That's how easy it was."

The consequences of all this folly will fall on the taxpayers.

"Now, the city is paying out their ass for this," McNesby said. He was referring to the millions of dollars in legal fees that taxpayers has spent to hire seven outside lawyers to defend more than 200 civil rights cases filed against the city by the convicted drug dealers that Seth Williams set free, the vast majority of whom had pleaded guilty.

The first civil rights case was settled by the city for $625,000. Because it would be difficult to defend the city in court against more than 200 such cases, the parties are reportedly talking about a “global settlement” that could cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

If the 200 formerly convicted drug dealers collect half of what the plaintiff in the first case got, the bill will be more than $60 million.

That's all on Seth. And as recounted in Newsweek, so is the crime spree that many of the convicted drug dealers went on after they got their sentences overturned.

So far, Seth Williams has been responsible for the overturning of the convictions of 852 drug dealers. But Seth's get-out-of-jail free extravaganza is still ongoing. Public Defender Bradley Bridge expects that by the time it's through, the final tally of drug dealers who have had their convictions overturned will hit 1,100.

What happened to the drug dealers who got out of jail? The court records of many of those convictions are gone from the system.

I was able to trace the histories of more than 400 of those drug dealers, however, who got their convictions overturned. As recounted in Newsweek, more than 200 of them got locked up again, many repeatedly, for more crimes that included narcotics, rape, robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, aggravated assault with a gun, attempted murder, and murder.

The freed drug dealers included Jason V. Siderio, 34, arrested by the narcotics unit on July 8, 2009 and charged with criminal conspiracy, possession and manufacture of barbiturates, after he was caught with pills that had a street value of $17,260.

As recounted in Newsweek, Siderio pleaded guilty on Oct. 21, 2010, and was sentenced to 2 ½ to 5 years in jail. But his conviction was overturned on June 19, 2014, thanks to the D.A. and the public defender.

Less than a year later, on March 18, 2015, Siderio was charged with murder after he allegedly shot to death Michael Walsh, 38, in the Gray’s Ferry section of Philadelphia. Siderio is currently being held in jail pending trial.

As recounted in Newsweek, many of the convictions overturned involved career criminals. Such as Anthony Hill, 26, of Northeast Philadelphia, who was arrested on May 3, 2009, for possession with intent to manufacture. After his original arrest, Hill was arrested seven more times on narcotics charges, and pleaded guilty six times.

The convicted drug dealers who went free also include Mario Adorno, 40, of North Philadelphia. The narcs arrested Adorno on July 20, 2006, a conviction that was overturned on Nov. 20, 2015. But after his original 2009 arrest for narcotics, Adorno was arrested 11 more times for narcotics, and pleaded guilty four times.

But guess what? Adorno is one of the more than 200 formerly convicted drug dealers who are suing the city claiming their civil rights were violated. If there's a global settlement, Adorno will collect.

All of this, the crime sprees, the millions in legal fees, the millions in future civil rights settlements, is on Rufus Seth Williams, our lawless D.A.

A man with no conscience. 

A man who put innocent men in jail and allowed thousands of guilty men to go free.

A man whose only guiding light is his own ambition.

This is your legacy Seth Williams.

You're a disgrace to your office and you should resign immediately.