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| Our contrite D.A. announcing he won't run again |
By Ralph Ciprianofor BigTrial.netLast week, our beleaguered District Attorney R. Seth Williams 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" in changing how the office operates.
Allow me to state an alternative theory: Williams did institute some far-reaching changes at the D.A.'s office, but it wasn't for the better. With three big decisions he made 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, possibly thousands 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![]() |
| Seth in happier times |
Let's start with Williams' alleged biggest accomplishment, 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.
Th 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 a couple of former archbishops, Anthony Bevilacqua and John Krol, all those guilty priests escaped punishment because their covered up crimes no longer fell within the statute of limitations.
While others saw a tragedy in the shame of the church, Seth Williams 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 Lynn. First, the state's original 1972 child endangerment law clearly didn't apply to supervisors such as Lynn. Instead, the law applied only to people who had direct contact with children, such as parents, guardians and teachers.
Lynne Abraham and a grand jury had open 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, 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.
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| The D.A. who staged a "historic" prosecution of the church |
So what did D.A. Williams do? He said when political gain is concerned, the law be damned. And then he went ahead and indicted Msgr. Lynn 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 stated 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 why.
The D.A.'s second problem with the Msgr. Lynn prosecution was that he needed a victim whose sex abuse fell within the statute of limitations, so he could prosecute the monsignor for endangering the welfare of a child. He 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 thousands of pages in the archdiocese's secret archives, a once secret history of sexual abuse by the clergy that was 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 Danny Gallagher with presents, attention, etc. In Gallagher's made-up stories, he and his family barely knew his attackers.
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 the church. 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.
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| Stormin' Seth |
To make the Billy Doe story work, the D.A. published 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.
The upshot: Lynne Abraham's 2005 grand jury report was factually checked and double checked by her staff of senior prosecutors so it 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. Meanwhile, the 2011 grand jury put out by Seth Williams 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 jail for helping to cover up sex abuse.
Maureen Dowd of The New York Times hailed Williams, raised Catholic, as the "avenging altar boy." 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 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.
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| Sideline Seth |
Meanwhile, the former lead detective in the Billy Doe case, Joe Walsh, is testifying on behalf of the defendants of the D.A.'s witch hunt.
Walsh testified to a Common Pleas Court judge last month about how he repeatedly told a prosecutor in the case, former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, about all the factual inconsistencies, 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. 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, 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 big series on the administration of his predecessor, Lynne Abraham, in a front-page four-part series 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. Among large urban counties, the newspaper found, Philadelphia had the lowest felony conviction rate. So Seth Williams proclaimed that his office 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 dark side of being smart on crime, the cops will tell you, was that under Seth Williams, the assistant district attorneys in his charging unit would only charge cases that were slam dunks. So that Seth could show voters a lower crime rate and a higher conviction rate.
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| Smart on Crime Seth |
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 invoked a he-said she-said dispute that could translate into a loss in court.
So this D.A. stopped charging attackers in domestic assaults. Even though state law said that when the cops arrived at the scene of a crime of domestic violence, witnessed injuries 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 prevent repeat offenses.
For years, the D.A.'s office, however, has refused to prosecute domestic violence cases where victims had refused to cooperate, often out of fear for their lives.
For the past week, nine such cases 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 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.
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n 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 start following state 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. 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, a man who pressed a sharp object against the victim's ribs and threatened to stab her, 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 application for 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 nothing stolen from the victim was found.
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."
A decision not to charge a suspect in a so-called stranger robbery can have deadly consequences.
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| Stylin' Seth |
As recounted in Newsweek, on Aug. 26,. 2015, the 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, just 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. 7th, 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 SouthIn 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 the members of the Narcotics Field Unit South. The D.A. had its own narcotics unit charged with busting drug dealers. But so did the Philadelphia police and the 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 public credit 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 the food chain.![]() |
| Sitting for his official portrait Seth |
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 members of the Narcotics Field Unit South and their supervisor protested what the D.A. was doing, 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. With that letter, the D.A. put the narcs out of business. Even though when he wrote that letter, as court records showed, the D.A. didn't have one scrap of evidence of any police misconduct.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 his spokesperson, a former Fox 29 reporter who was married to the managing editor at Fox 29.
"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 had seized 357 guns, $7 million worth of drugs and $1.8 million in cash.
But our D.A. decided to overturn the convictions of 852 drug dealers arrested by the Narcotics Field Unit. They all 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. "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 on all 26 counts of a 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 foreman said. When it came time to deliberate, "I could have been out of there in 10 minutes. That's how easy it was."]
"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 will have to pay to defend more than 200 civil rights cases filed against the city by the convicted drug dealers that Seth Williams set free.
To defend itself in the more than 200 civil rights lawsuits, the city is spending millions to hire seven outside lawyers from two law firms.
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 city will be out 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 who got their sentences overturned went on.
Seth Williams has been responsible for the overturning of the convictions of 852 drug dealers so far. 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 had their convictions overturned will hit 1,100.![]() |
| Shame of the city Seth |
What happened when the drug dealers got their freedom? 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 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 2009 conviction was overturned on Nov. 20, 2015, 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. And if there's a global settlement, Adorno will collect.
All of this, the crime wave, 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 guiding light is his own ambition.
This is your legacy Seth.
What a great D.A. you have been.
