Larry Krasner Referred to DOJ: Judge Finds Evidence of Perjury, Obstruction

“Protect the Office”: How a Federal Judge Concluded Philadelphia’s Top Prosecutor May Have Broken the Law

Lede: On September 15, 2026, U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond did something federal judges almost never do: he concluded, in a 40-page memorandum, that a sitting district attorney and one of his top deputies had likely committed federal crimes — perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy — in the handling of a single murder case. The district attorney is Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s twice-reelected progressive prosecutor. The case is an 18-year-old conviction that should have been a routine post-conviction filing. What it became, according to Diamond’s findings, was a case study in an office more concerned with protecting itself than with telling a federal court the truth.

Why This Matters: Krasner’s case is not an isolated scandal. It is the third documented instance this year of a prosecutor’s office manipulating court process to avoid accountability — following Chicago’s “Broadview Six” grand jury abuses and Colorado’s 11th Judicial District disqualification. Taken together, the pattern raises a question RSN has posed repeatedly this year: when the people responsible for enforcing the law are the ones breaking it, what mechanism actually holds them to account? In Philadelphia, as in Chicago and Colorado, the answer so far is: not much, and not quickly.

An Old Murder Case, Reopened

Dennis Johnson was convicted of second-degree murder in Pennsylvania state court in 2009 in the killing of Kenyatta Smith. More than a decade later, he filed a federal habeas corpus petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, arguing his trial counsel had been constitutionally ineffective. For years, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office — Krasner’s office — opposed the petition, as prosecutors’ offices typically do.

Then, in 2022, the office reversed course. Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Mason filed a brief conceding that Johnson’s trial counsel had indeed been ineffective and that the office had uncovered problems with witness testimony, recommending the conviction be overturned. A federal magistrate judge, Lynne A. Sitarski, agreed with Mason’s assessment. It looked, at that point, like a straightforward case of a prosecutor’s office correcting a past injustice — precisely the kind of self-correction reform-minded prosecutors are supposed to model.

The final decision, however, belonged to Judge Diamond, who signaled skepticism about Mason’s brief and scheduled an evidentiary hearing to examine how the office had reached its conclusions. That hearing — and what it exposed about the internal workings of the DA’s office — is what has now produced a criminal referral against the district attorney himself.

The Judge Who Doesn’t Bluff

Judge Diamond is not a Trump appointee looking to settle scores with a progressive prosecutor. He is a 73-year-old George W. Bush appointee, confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 2004, who began his own legal career as a Philadelphia assistant district attorney in the late 1970s before two decades in private practice handling civil litigation, white-collar criminal defense, and attorney disciplinary matters. He is, by nearly every account, an institutionalist with exacting standards — the kind of judge who applies the same scrutiny regardless of a prosecutor’s politics.

His record backs that up. In 2017, Diamond handled the corruption case of Krasner’s Democratic predecessor, Seth Williams, ordering Williams handcuffed immediately after his guilty plea and imposing the maximum five-year sentence, calling Williams a “criminal” who had fed from “the trough” of public money. Diamond has also, separately from the Krasner matter, federally disbarred one Krasner-office prosecutor and suspended another for three years in disciplinary proceedings connected to the broader pattern of filings the judge found troubling. This is a judge whose institutional skepticism has landed on both parties’ prosecutors — a detail that matters for anyone tempted to dismiss the Krasner referral as partisan theater.

What the Evidentiary Hearings Uncovered

When supervisors in the DA’s law division reviewed Mason’s 2022 brief ahead of Diamond’s scheduled hearing, they identified what they later called “material misstatements.” Rather than standing behind the filing, they withdrew it and prepared to apologize to the court, asking Mason to sign a corrected version. Mason refused and resigned. She later alleged that her supervisor, Matthew Stiegler, had orchestrated the original brief “at the urging” of Johnson’s defense attorneys without conducting any independent review of the case — conduct she characterized as “collusion.”

Mason’s former supervisors — Katherine Ernst, Steven Wildberger, David Napiorski, and Peter Andrews — disputed her account of collusion, testifying they were simply fulfilling their ethical obligation to correct the record once errors were found. But their testimony contained its own bombshell: they said Krasner had personally resisted their preferred fix, which was to hand the compromised case to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office to avoid the appearance of self-dealing.

According to that testimony, Krasner wanted the matter handled in a way that would “protect the office.” He reportedly told staff that those who did not follow his direction would face “consequences.” And he opposed referring the case to the Attorney General’s office in part because he characterized that office’s staff in derogatory terms, according to sworn testimony recounted in court filings. Krasner denied these characterizations through his attorneys but did not personally take the stand to rebut them, citing the case’s pending status.

“Reluctantly Concluded”: Inside the Memorandum

By August 2026, after evidentiary hearings that began in May, Diamond had heard enough to say publicly that “if what they say is true, potential wrongdoing abounds,” naming perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice as the potential federal crimes in play.

On September 15, he made it official. In a 40-page memorandum, Diamond wrote: “I have thus reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia’s highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law.” He found the evidence showed “false statements, false declarations under oath, perjury, obstruction of justice and conspiracy,” and concluded that Krasner had urged law division supervisors to present a false narrative to the court — specifically, one that blamed Mason alone for errors that reflected a broader supervisory failure inside the office. Diamond separately found Stiegler’s own testimony “contradictory, evasive, or outright dishonest.”

The practical consequences were immediate. Diamond disqualified both Krasner and Stiegler from any further role in the Johnson case — along with an outside attorney Krasner had separately selected to handle it — and referred the entire matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for potential criminal investigation. He acknowledged in the memorandum that “it is not immediately clear which prosecutor might take it on,” leaving the underlying habeas case, and Dennis Johnson’s fate, in limbo. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has so far declined to say whether it will open an investigation, and legal experts note that any such inquiry could take months or longer to reach a conclusion — if it reaches one at all. A federal judge can refer a matter for prosecution; he cannot compel prosecutors to act on it.

“I have thus reluctantly concluded that Philadelphia’s highest law enforcement official and one of his top assistants may have violated the law.”
— U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond, memorandum opinion, September 15, 2026

Krasner’s Response — and What He Doesn’t Dispute

Krasner has not been charged with anything, and it bears repeating that Diamond’s findings are exactly that — findings by a single federal judge in a civil post-conviction proceeding, not a criminal conviction or even an indictment. Krasner’s office responded through a statement attributed to the district attorney: “I respectfully and vigorously disagree with the court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law. I look forward to appealing to the higher court as soon as the law allows.”

That is a categorical denial of Diamond’s legal conclusions. It is not, notably, a denial that the underlying 2022 brief contained the misstatements his own office identified and withdrew — nor a rebuttal, under oath, of the supervisors’ testimony about his stated preference to keep the matter in-house. Those facts remain, for now, uncontested in the public record. What Krasner disputes is Diamond’s characterization of his conduct as potentially criminal, and he has signaled he intends to appeal once the case’s posture allows it.

Political Fallout — and the Case for Restraint

The reaction in Philadelphia has been notably muted among Krasner’s usual political allies. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker declined to comment. City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who backed Krasner’s reelection campaign last year, also declined to comment. Pennsylvania State Representative Martina White, a Republican, called for Krasner’s resignation outright, saying “Philadelphia needs a reliable DA, not a defendant-in-waiting.”

In fairness to Krasner and his remaining supporters, the loudest pushback deserves to be heard rather than dismissed. Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the criminal-justice reform group Straight Ahead, characterized the referral as “a continuation of the right’s assault on DA Krasner,” pointing to years of conservative efforts to remove him from office. Sergio Cea of Reclaim Philadelphia noted that Krasner has proven politically “like Teflon,” winning primary after primary despite lacking establishment Democratic backing.

That skepticism is worth taking seriously rather than waving away, and it is also worth noting where it does and doesn’t hold up. Krasner has faced politically motivated attacks before: Pennsylvania’s Republican-led House voted to impeach him in 2022 over his enforcement priorities and the city’s gun violence rate, and state appellate courts — including the Pennsylvania Supreme Court — later agreed with Krasner that the impeachment process itself had been procedurally improper. That history is real, and it means Krasner’s supporters have legitimate grounds for institutional distrust of efforts to remove him by other means.

But Diamond’s memorandum is not a political attack in the mold of the 2022 impeachment. It rests on sworn testimony from Krasner’s own former supervisors, on an internal review that Krasner’s own office conducted and then tried to walk back, and on the judge’s assessment of witness credibility developed over months of hearings — not on policy disagreements about charging decisions or crime rates. Diamond’s history of sanctioning a Democratic predecessor as severely as he has now referred a sitting Democratic incumbent suggests an institutionalist’s consistency more than a partisan’s agenda. The two things — legitimate concern about politically motivated attacks on a reform prosecutor, and a judge’s documented, sworn-testimony-based findings about internal misconduct — are not mutually exclusive, and RSN readers should hold both in view rather than collapsing the story into either “witch hunt” or “guilty as charged.”

A Pattern Repeating Across Jurisdictions

What makes the Krasner referral significant beyond Philadelphia is how closely it tracks a pattern RSN has documented in three separate jurisdictions this year. In Chicago, federal prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros dismissed skeptical grand jurors and coached testimony to force an indictment against the “Broadview Six” protesters — misconduct a federal judge called the worst she had witnessed before a grand jury. In Colorado’s 11th Judicial District, a judge disqualified an entire district attorney’s office this July after 23 documented discovery violations, months after the previous DA had been disbarred for the identical conduct — a story RSN covered in “The Succession of Failure.” And in Illinois, a special prosecution unit was found to have weaponized institutional blindness to shield its own conduct from review.

These are not ideologically uniform cases. Boutros is a Trump-era U.S. Attorney; Krasner is among the most prominent progressive prosecutors in the country; Colorado’s disqualified office had no particular national profile at all. What unites them is not partisan direction but institutional posture: in each case, when internal errors surfaced, the office’s first instinct was reportedly to manage the narrative and protect personnel rather than to correct the record transparently and accept the consequences. In each case, it took a federal or state judge — not an internal ethics process, not a bar association, not an election — to force the issue into public view.

That is the deeper institutional failure RSN has tracked all year: prosecutorial accountability in the United States depends almost entirely on the accident of which judge happens to be assigned a given case, and on that judge’s willingness to spend months holding evidentiary hearings most jurists would rather avoid. Remove Judge Diamond from the Dennis Johnson docket, and there is little reason to believe any of this surfaces at all.

What Happens to Dennis Johnson?

Lost in the institutional drama is the man at the center of it. Dennis Johnson’s habeas petition — the question of whether his 2009 murder conviction should stand — remains unresolved. Diamond’s disqualification of Krasner, Stiegler, and Krasner’s outside counsel means Johnson’s case now needs a new prosecutor before it can even proceed, on top of a criminal referral against the very office that was supposed to represent the Commonwealth’s interests in his case. Johnson has now spent additional years in prison while his own prosecutors’ internal turf war over “protecting the office” played out in federal court. Whatever the truth of the ineffective-counsel claim that started this case in 2009, Johnson has become collateral damage in a scandal entirely of the DA’s office’s own making.

The Accountability Question

Krasner is currently in his third term as district attorney, with that term not set to expire until 2030. Barring resignation or removal, he will remain Philadelphia’s chief law enforcement officer for years while a possible federal criminal investigation into his own conduct proceeds on an unknown timeline — assuming the U.S. Attorney’s Office decides to pursue one at all. Inside his own office, morale has reportedly cratered; one longtime prosecutor described the allegations as “devastating” and said the office’s reputation “has been reduced to rubble.”

Whatever one makes of Krasner’s politics, the pattern this case fits is not a partisan one. It is the same pattern RSN has documented in Chicago and Colorado this year: an institution’s leadership choosing to manage a mistake rather than own it, and a judiciary that — when it works as designed — is the last line capable of forcing the issue into daylight. The open question, in Philadelphia as in Chicago and Colorado, is whether a referral to prosecutors who serve at the pleasure of the same political system is enough to constitute real accountability, or whether it is simply where these stories go to be forgotten.