Think the Philly DA situation is a bit more unique and interesting. Yeah, agree, he was one of the first progressive DA's elected in recent times, and he is in many ways light on crime. But he just got re-elected by a 75% in 2025 for a third term. That's incredible and think there is a reason for this.

Am no expert on him, but as we're all talking about here, the legal system is really messed up. Yeah, there are a lot of terrible processes and laws that get in the way of justice, and a lot of the things his office did made a lot of sense.

Probably one of the biggest was the "Elimination of Cash Bail for Low-Level Offenses." The cash bail system for minor crimes really screws poor people, who can't make bail for things like shoplifting, and have to stay in jail until their pre-trial. (it's often something like $1000, which for middle-class people is not a big deal at all). But imagine a teen who had to stay out of school for a month or even two just because they stole something for $20 and his family can't put together $1k. The teen gets behind in class and stops trying, and this becomes the start of getting further and further behind in life. And a similar situation happens with poor working-class people for a minor crime, they can't pay bail, so they are in jail and can't work. They are often fired or just get into debt because they're not drawing a salary.

I don't know about anything about open drug markets, but think overall what the Philly DA seemed sensible (and just looked briefly and it seems like the crime statistics turned out well in Philly, but that could be from a number of things).

You're not entirely wrong but I think that description of the situation is rather heavily colored by partisanship. Being lenient about a very limited subset of crime that "the system" is particularly ineffective at dealing with (to the point that it is arguably racist/classist/etc) is viewed favorably by certain (primarily urban) demographics. When you have broad support for an elected official who is exercising a great deal of discretion to not enforce the law that should trigger fundamental changes to the system as opposed to impeachment.

Good!!!

That’s why I live hippie liberal voters!

Good. DA should focus on a rational plan to tackle high-impact crimes, not drug offenses.

You're assuming people view all crime the same.

I'll applaud ignoring the open air drug market. It's a symptom, not a cause. The drug *war* is the biggest crime problem in the country.

Which is why there's a push to accept a plea deal. Innocent people can easily end up accepting a plea deal after a day in jail, and pushy investigators trying to get out a confession.

> I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.

Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.

https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/resource/right-assistance...

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/right_to_counsel

Well, now that this story is coming to light, I'm guessing getting a decent lawyer will be pretty easy.

The DA can file the charges and drop the case right before (or even during) trial. No loss on their books

https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/

You can get a rough idea of innocence by exoneration rates + years served. Above-link is just for that one project, which is one of the largest in this arena.

It would also be wise to assume that all exonerations only reflect a small minority of actually innocent people especially when you start factoring in 'crimes' like possession charges or debt (https://www.aclu.org/publications/pound-flesh-criminalizatio...)

A corollary of the “innocent until proven guilty” standard is that there’s just no way to compute such statistics. It’s impossible by design to distinguish between a clearly innocent person and a very suspicious person whose guilt couldn’t quite be proven without looking into the details of their case.

"Tough on crime" is often a euphemism for "lock the innocent".