Ariel Benjamin Mannes was featured in a recent BigTrial article. Below is an excerpt. For the full article, click here.
“District Attorney Larry Krasner lied about the existence of public records that would show just how many cases his inept and corrupt office has turned down for prosecution.
Krasner doesn’t want the public to know about the more than 200 cases his so-called charging unit declines to prosecute every month, or the 2,562 cases his office declined to prosecute during 2018, his first year in office. These cases run the gamut of crimes, including aggravated assault, prostitution, bringing weapons to school, robbery and rape.
There’s another public document that Krasner hopes the public never sees: a list that tracks the number of cases where the district attorney’s office downgrades charges, which average nearly a hundred a month, or a total of 1,159 for 2018. Such as when Michael White stabbed Sean Schellenger, an unarmed man, to death in July 2018 with a knife with a six-inch blade in Rittenhouse Square. And Krasner twice downgraded the charges in the case, from first-degree murder, to third-degree murder, and finally, to voluntary manslaughter.
Krasner doesn’t want the public to know about the deals he cuts with criminals, and he doesn’t want them to know about all the cases where arrests were made, or the cops said they knew who the bad guy was, but the D.A.’s office was too inept or corrupt to take the case to court.”