D.A.'s Office Under Seth Williams Won't Prosecute Domestic Violence

By Ralph Cipriano

for BigTrial.net

On Nov. 22, 2015, Timothy Cohen, 38, of West Philadelphia, a patron at the Liberty Bar, put a hat on the head of a female bar employee.

Cohen then allegedly used the strings from the hat to strangle the victim “to a point where she could not breathe or scream,” according to a police affidavit of probable cause. 

"She struggled with Cohen," the affidavit says, until he "let go and left the premises." Cohen had also gone on Facebook and made “threatening posts” against the victim, according to the affidavit.

The victim was treated at Penn Presbyterian Hospital later that day for a sprained cervical column. But when the cops sent a probable cause affidavit over to the district attorney's office, the D.A. declined to charge the suspect, citing "insufficient evidence." 

The D.A.'s office told the police they needed to obtain photos of the victim's injuries, a copy of the defendant’s phone records and his voice mails. The D.A.'s office also wanted to know if there were any witnesses at the bar who may have seen the incident.

Cohen, according to police records, was not charged for the assault. 

The district attorney's office declined to discuss the case.

The cops say that many of the cases that the D.A.'s office under Seth Williams has declined to prosecute involve domestic violence, typically involving women. But in Philadelphia, when men are the victims of domestic violence, the result is often the same; this D.A. won’t press charges.

Take a three day period last December, where the D.A. declined to charge three different suspects in three different domestic violence cases.

On Dec. 8, 2016, officers responding to a report of a person with a gun, went to the intersection of 52^nd and Haverford Avenues in Philadelphia and found “a male lying on the highway suffering from a gunshot wound to the right side of his body.

Police rushed Lawrence Gilliam, 49, of Upper Darby, PA, to Presbyterian Hospital where he was “immediately taken to surgery,” police records state. A suspect in the shooting, the cops said, was observed visiting the victim in his hospital room.

Gilliam’s wife, Kanem Gilliam, 45, of Yeadon, PA, subsequently confessed to police that she shot her husband with a .38 special revolver that she kept in her bedroom.

But later that night, the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute Gilliam because of “insufficient probable cause,” and “insufficient evidence.” 

The video of the shooting incident was “very unclear,” an assistant D.A. stated. The assistant D.A. also asked the cops to obtain the wife’s phone records.

Kanem Gilliam, according to police records, was not charged for shooting her husband.

The D.A.'s office declined to discuss the case.

A day after the Gilliam case, on Dec. 9, 2016, police responded to a radio call and found Juan Soto holding a towel to his head “where he was bleeding profusely from a laceration. Soto told the police that his girlfriend, Angela Lagarex, “struck him in the head with the leg of a wooden chair causing the laceration.”
 

The cops took Soto to Temple University Hospital, where he required multiple staples to close a severe head wound. But the District Attorney declined to prosecute the case, citing insufficient probable cause, and insufficient evidence.

Lagarex, according to police records, was not charged for assaulting her husband.

The D.A.'s office declined to discuss the case.

A day after Soto was taken to the hospital, on Dec. 10, 2016, the district attorney declined to prosecute another domestic violence incident. This time, the cops had to break down a door because they could hear a woman’s "repeated screams," according to police records. The cops rushed upstairs to “observe the offender striking the complainant multiple times,” police records state.

But the district attorney declined to prosecute the case because the victim wouldn’t give a statement, and because the D.A. wanted more information from the cops.

“We’ve been working really hard to charge more of these” domestic abuse cases, Deputy District Attorney Barry said. But you need a cooperating witness to have probable cause, Barry said. And in many domestic abuse cases, the victims are not willing to cooperate.

The district attorney’s office, however, declined to discuss the case where the officers had to break down the door to stop an assault.

Cops will tell you that the reason this D.A. 's office wouldn't charge anything but a slam-dunk case was that Seth Williams was trying to pad his statistics for the May 16th Democratic primary, so he could show voters a lower crime rate and a higher conviction rate.

"We understand there is an election going on but it really doesn’t affect what we’re doing," Barry said before his boss announced last week that he wouldn't seek a third term.

"We're not doing anything because in every case we have to feel comfortable that we have the right crime [charged] and the right evidence," Barry said.