Philly Inquirer Censors The News To Prop Up D.A. Krasner

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

At the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, the newspaper marshaled all of its resources to support one of its progressive heroes, District Attorney Larry Krasner.

After a trio of suburban Republicans in the state House of Representatives launched a drive to impeach Krasner, the Inquirer responded last week with a barrage of censorship and propaganda aimed at propping up Krasner, while the shootings and murders in this town continued unabated. 

The Inquirer's multi-pronged attack began on Tuesday when the three house members, joined by state Rep. Martina White, another Republican from Northeast Philadelphia, held a press conference on the steps of the State Capitol in Harrisburg that featured a rainbow coalition of two dozen crime victims protesting against Krasner.

It made for compelling drama. Julio Moran talked about his mother, Gladys Coriano, a religious woman barely five feet tall, and how she was shot to death by an abusive ex-husband who had repeatedly violated a protection order by stalking, harassing and attacking her. 

Despite a half-dozen police reports, Moran said, the D.A.'s office under Krasner repeatedly declined to protect his mother and then sat on an arrest warrant for six days, which gave the abusive ex-husband another chance to shoot and kill her.

"The D.A.'s office would not do their jobs and they would not hold the offender accountable for his actions," Moran said. "This was a violent predator."

“My mother didn’t fall through the cracks of the criminal justice system," Moran said. "She fell through a trapdoor created by Krasner and his group of false public servants.” 

John Toomey also attended the rally to talk about how Krasner was responsible for his son's tragic death, because he doesn't believe in putting armed and dangerous criminals in jail.  

Sean Toomey, just 15, was carrying a case of bottled water from his dad's car when a couple of would-be carjackers attacked, shot him in the head, and killed him.

"Who's going to bring him back to me, who's going to bring back my boy?" Toomey asked. "I say, we impeach this son-of-a-bitch."

Nakisha Billa talked about how her son, Dominic Billa-Lewis, 20, was gunned down in the food court of a mall by a criminal with a "a long rap sheet." Billa, who voted to reelect Krasner, now says he should be impeached. 

"Never would I have supported him if I knew he'd be offering deals for aiding in murder, the taking of someone's life," she said. "Never would I have done that."

Yes, it was compelling stuff, but you didn't read a word about it in the Inquirer. That's because the newspaper, which has a bureau of reporters stationed in Harrisburg, decided to censor the event, and pretend that it had never really happened.

It wasn't the only time last week that the Inquirer decided to censor a news story because it might cast Krasner in a bad light.

On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Mitchell Goldberg convened a two-hour hearing at the federal courthouse where he questioned three high-ranking supervisors in the D.A.'s office about why they  had, in the opinion of the judge, breached their "obligation to be candid with the court."

At issue was the case of Robert Wharton, who, with a co-defendant, was convicted in 1984 of strangling and drowning to death a husband and wife. After Wharton and his codefendant got through murdering the couple and ransacking their home, they turned off the heat in the dead of winter and left the couple's infant daughter, then 7-months old, alone to freeze to death. Before they left, the killers even stole the infant's crib.

Krasner got involved in the case by waving the white flag after a criminal defense lawyer filed a  motion to get Wharton off death row. In going along with a defense motion to spare Wharton's life, the three supervisors in the D.A.'s office contended to Judge Goldberg that Warton had supposedly rehabilitated himself in prison.

But the supervisors didn't tell the judge that in 1986, Wharton had tried to escape from a courtroom in City Hall, and was only stopped after he was shot twice by a sheriff's deputy. 

The D.A.'s office also neglected to inform Judge Goldberg that they hadn't bothered to contact the only surviving child of the murdered couple, as they were required to do by law, to let her know that they were trying to get the convicted killer of her parents off death row.

It was a unique event, a federal judge calling out three supervisors in Krasner's office because they had basically lied to him in their zeal to help a double murderer get off death row. 

The Inquirer had a reporter stationed in the courtroom who sat through the entire two-hour hearing. But once again, the newspaper decided to censor the story, and never print a word about Judge Goldberg's hearing.

Why?

Well, here's a clue. The next morning, the Inquirer ran an editorial entitled, "End the Krasner impeachment sideshow."

"Any effort to impeach Krasner would only disenfranchise the overwhelming majority of voters in Philadelphia who clearly support the district attorney’s efforts," the editorial stated.

"To be sure, Krasner is not perfect, and it would be better for everyone if Philadelphia’s top prosecutor, the police, City Council, and the mayor worked together to reduce gun violence," the editorial stated. "But some of Krasner’s reforms, such as releasing numerous wrongfully convicted individuals and holding corrupt cops accountable, are welcome and overdue."

Not perfect? Not working with city officials to reduce gun violence?

Are we talking about "Let 'Em Loose Larry," who runs the D.A.'s office for the benefit of criminals, and routinely gives them either a pass or a light sentence? And that's just the start of the character flaws and bad behavior of the D.A. that the Inquirer is telling us is "not perfect."

We're talking about a D.A. who is [a] a habitual liar who [b] doesn't pay his taxes and [c] has repeatedly and brazenly violated the city's campaign finance laws as well as [d] is completely responsible for the destruction of the D.A.'s office.

In the face of all that, the Inquirer continues to blindly support Krasner despite the daily carnage and bloodshed in our lawless city. Under Krasner's watch, the annual murder rate has jumped from 325 in 2017, the year before he took office, to an all-time record last year of 562 murders; a 78% increase.

Non-fatal shootings over the same five-year period jumped from 1,028 in 2017 to 1,846 last year, a 79% increase. 

And the gun violence continues unabated. So far this year, the Inquirer reported yesterday, nearly 1,100 people have been shot, an 8% increase over last year's all-time record. The murder count is at 251 as of last night, only 6% behind last year's record pace. 

Philadelphia last year also set an all-time record for carjackings, with 847; that's another record that the city's on a pace to break this year.

Yet the Inquirer is telling us that this historic level of bloodshed, carnage and lawlessness is somehow balanced by:

-- [a] the 28 convicted felons that Krasner let out of jail during his "exonerations," where the D.A. cuts deals with his soulmates in the defense bar, to free the felons without ever having to present any evidence in court. 

-- and [b] the two cops that he's convicted of felonies out of the 52 cops that he's indicted for felonies, a conviction rate of 3.8%. One cop was convicted for drunk driving; the other for rape and sexual assault. 

So in order to support Krasner in an editorial, and attack the three suburban legislators leading the charge to impeach him, the Inquirer decided not to run a news story that was going on right under its nose at the federal courthouse, just two blocks away from the Inquirer's offices on Market Street.

Why? Because the newspaper didn't want to print any news story that might provide the public with any fresh evidence that Krasner should be impeached.

To make matters worse, the Inquirer had previously characterized Judge Goldberg's admonishment of the D.A.'s office for repeatedly lying to him as mere "sparring" between legal combatants. In the same deliberately misleading story, the newspaper allowed Krasner's spokesperson to attack the judge's admonishment of the D.A.'s office for a "lack of candor" as "an unsurprising byproduct of dealing with those invested in the status quo."

In defending Krasner's attempt to get a debauched killer off death row, the newspaper also chose to follow Krasner's lead by willfully ignoring the outrage of the only survivor of the double murder committed by Wharton.

"At no point was I contacted by the District Attorney or anyone in his office to ascertain what my views are," wrote Lisa Hart-Newman, the crime victim ignored and silenced by the Inquirer.

"Seeing as I was also a victim in this tragedy, my opinion should have been sought and should carry weight," she wrote Judge Goldberg. "At seven months old, after my parents had been murdered, I was left in a house where the heat had been intentionally turned off in hopes that I would die. I am the sole survivor of this tragedy and I am alive despite his efforts."

When she finally found out about Krasner's compliance in the attempt to get the convicted killers of her parents off death row, Hart-Newman told the judge, “It was as though, well, it’s already done, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t matter, essentially.” 

At Judge Goldberg's hearing that the Inquirer decided not to cover, David Rudovsky, a longtime civil rights lawyer was hired by the D.A.'s office to defend the three supervisors who were facing sanctions.

At the hearing, Judge Goldberg asked Rudovsky if the public deserved to know the inner deliberations of the D.A.'s office, and why they had decided not to fight the defense motion to get Wharton off death row.

 "Absolutely not," Rudovsky replied.

The judge also asked Rudovsky if the relatives of the murder victims had a right to know why the D.A. was coming to the aid of the convicted killer.

 Rudovsky replied that the relatives of the crime victims were "completely irrelevant."

But for the Inquirer, censoring the news wasn't enough.

On Thursday, the same day the Inquirer censored the Judge Goldberg story, it ran another long opus by Samantha Melamed, a social justice warrior who serves at the Inquirer as Krasner's full-time chief propagandist.

Melamed's latest pro criminal justice reform piece was about a serial informant who has testified in six murder cases, and has supposedly since recanted. 

My problem with Melamed is that she presents Krasner's ongoing attacks on ancient murder convictions in the best light for the defense, often at the expense of reality, typically while sanitizing the crime as well as the criminal.

Three times, I have caught Melamed, who is habitually spoon-fed by her friends in the D.A.'s office,  committing journalistic fraud by:

-- [a] Falsely portraying a foul-mouthed stripper who brought her one-year-old infant daughter along on drug buys as the saintly victim of an overzealous murder prosecution.

-- [b] Falsely stating the facts of an officer-involved shooting; even the criminal who got shot by the cop testified in court and completely contradicted Melamed's ridiculously pro-defense account of the facts of the shooting.

--- [c] Falsely reporting the details of an appeals court decision that declared a do-not-call list of cops that Krasner has banned from testifying in court. The appeals court ruled that Krasner's list was unconstitutional, but Melamed, who obviously didn't bother to read the decision, cast the ruling in a false light and let Krasner falsely state in her misleading story that he actually won the case. 

I don't trust anything Melamed writes because she's Krasner's propagandist, and neither should you. 

So if you're keeping score at home, that's two times in the past week that the Inquirer decided to censor two news events, Judge Goldberg's hearing and the anti-Krasner rally in Harrisburg, because they might cast Krasner in a bad light.

And that's two times last week that the newspaper ran two pieces of pro-Krasner propaganda, as in the anti-impeachment editorial and the Melamed story, to buck up their boy Krasner while the state house was drumming up public support to impeach the D.A.

I sent an email yesterday to Gabe Escobar, the Inquirer's top editor, seeking comment. But Escobar, who habitually stonewalls me -- just like Larry Krasner does -- did not respond to a request for comment. 

The Inquirer should be impeached for crimes against journalism. They are deliberately slanting the news and not printing the news because they've sold their soul -- as well as their integrity -- to a corrupt charlatan named Larry Krasner.