The D.A.'s office says that the records are misleading, and that all the charges were approved by assistant D.A.s.
The charges were eventually reduced to misdemeanors or dismissed altogether when the cases finally caught the attention of judges in court. But in the meantime, the defendants spent thousands of dollars on attorneys, and taxpayers spent thousands for multiple court proceedings - including police overtime.
It's more evidence of a problem that all the candidates for district attorney are citing on the campaign trail: bad decision-making by the D.A.'s office, allowing hundreds of weak, overcharged cases to bog down the criminal-justice system.
In the early 1980s, when Ed Rendell was D.A., he fought a political battle with the Police Department, finally establishing a charging unit inside the D.A.'s office with responsibility for filing criminal charges. Previously, the Police Department could level criminal charges on its own.
"In the old days, assistant district attorneys would review police fact sheets and lend a critical eye to what was going on," said Dan McCaffery, one of the five Democratic candidates for D.A. "Now you have young, inexperienced paralegals, probably a bit afraid of the police and intimidated by them. . . . They tend to be rubber-stamps for the police, and there tends to be overcharging."
Another candidate, Brian J. Grady, who has an active criminal-defense practice, said: "The chief of the unit is still a D.A. He supervises. But most of the people are . . . young people without law degrees. I would put D.A.s back in there, trust their judgment and implore them to use reasonableness."
