Among the hundreds of politicians clamoring for public attention in Pennsylvania are eight who are caught up in an intensifying debate over Pennsylvanians’ personal and economic safety, because each wants to be the state’s next attorney general.
Most have direct ties to the Philadelphia region, where law enforcement is under a microscope because of increased crime. In the campaign, there has been talk of violent crime in general, corporate treatment of consumers, justice system fairness, and – not surprisingly – claims about having the best credentials of the bunch.
Five candidates are Democrats, two are Republicans, and one – Eric Settle – carries the banner of the new Forward Party and won’t be on the ballot until November.
The major-party candidates will vie in April 23 primary elections. The winners will face off in the Nov. 5 general election, and a Forward Party spokesperson said Mr. Settle intends to file the required nomination papers to make the Nov. 5 ballot.
Democrat Joe Khan of Doylestown, Bucks County, described himself during a debate as “the most qualified person to run for this office.” Another Democrat, Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer, said in an interview that the job he now holds is “the best job to prepare someone to be state attorney general.” And Republican Rep. Craig Williams said he is the only major-party candidate “talking about taking the fight back to the criminals.”
Rep. Jared Solomon had a huge fundraising year in 2023, and last month had the most campaign money on hand among the Democrats. York County District Attorney David Sunday is the only one of the seven major party candidates to have a party endorsement, given by state Republicans in January. Longtime Democratic public defender Keir Bradford-Grey has been ahead of the curve for years on criminal justice reform – giving her perspective and depth of knowledge on a key political issue.
The seventh major-party candidate, Democrat Eugene DePasquale, is the only one to have been an elected state row officer previously, serving as auditor general for eight years.
The state constitution says the attorney general must be at least 30, a U.S. citizen who has lived in Pennsylvania for at least seven years, and a member of the bar of the state Supreme Court. The current attorney general, Michelle Henry, makes $197,748 a year. Appointed by former Attorney General Josh Shapiro in 2023 after Mr. Shapiro became governor, Ms. Henry is not seeking election to the office.
The attorney general’s office has a budget of $139 million and more than 1,000 employees. Its responsibilities include prosecution of drug traffickers, child predators and corrupt public officials; protecting consumers and overseeing charitable trusts; and representing state agencies in court. The consequential decisions required of its leader can garner widespread praise or criticism.
Mr. Shapiro’s office ran a two-year statewide grand jury investigation into sexual abuse of children by priests. Like Mr. Shapiro, Tom Corbett served as attorney general before becoming governor, and it was during his tenure that claims of child sex abuse against Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky came to light.
Another attorney general, Kathleen Kane, was convicted of perjury and went to prison.
This year, five of the seven major party candidates live in the Philadelphia region, as does Mr. Settle. The political firestorm surrounding the law enforcement policies of progressive Democratic Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has served as a platform for some of the candidates to lay out how they’ll handle the attorney general job, should they win it.
JACK STOLLSTEIMER
Mr. Stollsteimer has had an up-close-and-personal view of Mr. Krasner’s work.
He’s a Democrat – like Mr. Krasner – but any similarity ends there. As top law enforcement officer in a county that sits on Philadelphia’s western border, Mr. Stollsteimer said in an interview he has watched criminals spill across that border because of “Larry Krasner’s experiment.”
Mr. Krasner has, in Mr. Stollsteimer’s opinion, proven the “broken window” theory that if you let criminals get away with small crimes, they will commit larger ones.
“He initiated a policy where you could steal up to $499 of retail merchandise without getting arrested. You would get a ticket,” Mr. Stollsteimer said. Now, he said, Philadelphia retailers have left town or locked up their wares, and so criminals are fanning out into the suburbs.
“They are coming out here and finding out we don’t give them citations. You get arrested. You get fingerprinted; you are going to get prosecuted,” Mr. Stollsteimer said. The takeaway for Mr. Stollsteimer, who is 61 and lives in Haverford Township, is the need for a “consistent, collaborative policy” on all major criminal justice issues.
He is a former assistant U.S. attorney who is intensely proud of his lineage as the son of an Army veteran who became a union bus driver and a woman who survived a Nazi slave labor camp. That woman – his mother, Henrietta – settled with her family in the city of Chester. Mr. Stollsteimer said it was “the first place she ever lived as a free person” and the power of that family experience put his heart into enforcing laws in Chester County.
He is equally proud of his union chops. Mr. Stollsteimer says he has blazed a path in prosecuting “wage theft” in which companies use illegal schemes to pay workers less than they deserve.
And, he added, “I am going to do a lot more of that as attorney general.”
CRAIG WILLIAMS
A Marine Corps veteran who flew 56 combat missions in an F/A-18D Hornet fighter and attack jet during the Gulf War, Mr. Williams, a Republican, is blunt about what should happen with Mr. Krasner.
“A criminal investigation needs to be opened against Larry Krasner, the DA of Philadelphia,” Mr. Williams said in an interview. A second-term state representative from Concord Township, Delaware County, Mr. Williams was chosen to manage the Senate impeachment trial of Mr. Krasner after the House voted to impeach the Philadelphia DA in November 2022
That trial has not happened because of an ongoing court fight. Mr. Krasner said House Republicans are targeting his policies.
But according to Mr. Williams, the “fact patterns” in Mr. Krasner’s conduct support the prosecution. “That’s how you deal with these progressive district attorneys who are playing fast and loose with the law,” Mr. Williams said.
He is 59 and retired from the Marines with 28 years of service, including about 16 on active duty. Mr. Williams says one of his chief attributes for attorney general is the breadth of his experience.
He was chief prosecutor at Camp Pendleton, the largest base in the Marine Corps; an attorney for the utility company PECO; and was a federal prosecutor in Colorado and Philadelphia. He worked in the Project Safe Neighborhoods program where prior convicted felons found in possession of guns were sent to prison.
Since he has been a representative in Harrisburg, Mr. Williams said he has worked to have millions of dollars put in the state budget to hire assistant district attorneys in Philadelphia and Delaware counties specifically to go after felons in possession of guns.
“Violent crime is overwhelmingly committed by prior convicted felons,” he said.
KEIR BRADFORD-GREY
The Philadelphia criminal justice system has been the setting for much of Ms. Bradford-Grey’s public defender work, and she believes work to improve that system — work in which she has played a significant role — is not done.
“We have a process that always needs to be reevaluated and improved so that it actually advances public safety and it is more constructive than destructive,” she said in an interview.
Ms. Bradford-Grey, 49, is a Democrat who lives in Philadelphia. She has been a partner at a law firm for the last few years, but the main thread of her career has been public defense.
In an interview, she said she sees the job of attorney general as a natural progression from working on behalf of people when “all the issues that have happened in their life have compounded, with them sitting next to me at the defense counsel table.”
She became a public defender in Philadelphia in 1999, then worked as a federal defender in Delaware. She was then named director of the Montgomery County Public Defender Office by then-County Commissioner Josh Shapiro, and ultimately was appointed chief defender of the Defender Association of Philadelphia.
That city’s bail hearing system, she said, was unfair. “We had a two-minute hearing that really didn’t lend for much information-gathering,” she said.
Ms. Bradford-Grey said she created new structures in the process to “fact gather and information gather.” There were new alternatives for social services, a new standard of review for initial bail decisions, and the inception of what Ms. Bradford-Grey called “bail navigators” to help people navigate the conditions in which they are released, by using community supports.
It’s her first run for elective office. “This role is probably one of the most dynamic roles for a lawyer who wants to make an impact, to improve the lives and well-being of people,” she said.
DAVID SUNDAY
For Mr. Sunday, the big-city crime generator on the outskirts of his jurisdiction is Baltimore, not Philadelphia. But the parallels are there.
“Because we are directly north of Baltimore and we border Baltimore County, we have certain challenges that require robust law enforcement responses,” Mr. Sunday said in an interview. “We always have a federal prosecutor that is embedded in our office to collaborate with our federal partners.”
Mr. Sunday, 48, is a Republican who lives in Spring Garden Township, York County. He joined the York district attorney’s office in 2009 and has been elected to run it twice. For four years, working in the same office, he was a special assistant U.S. attorney, working on large-scale gang and illegal gun cases.
The transformative year for him was 2015, when drug overdose deaths tripled as the opioid epidemic metastasized.
“I was assigned the task of looking into the overdose death increase,” Mr. Sunday said. What followed were hundreds of town halls and visits with people in fire halls, churches, and family living rooms. The experience helped forge the criminal justice philosophy he hopes to bring to the attorney general’s office, which is “accountability and redemption.”
His work, he said, has helped bring about a 30% reduction in overall crime in York County since he was elected. Overdose deaths declined by 26% during a five-year stretch of his tenure, he said.
The accountability-redemption approach can work in Philadelphia, he said.
“As attorney general, I will absolutely utilize all the investigative and prosecutorial tools we have in the AG’s office to keep the the citizens of Philadelphia safe,” he said. But another key, he said, will be working with community leaders, faith leaders, business owners and others to figure out what is really happening.
EUGENE DEPASQUALE
Mr. DePasquale has a unique attribute among the seven candidates: previous experience in a statewide row office. The 52-year-old resident of Pittsburgh served as auditor general for eight years starting in 2013.
Mr. DePasquale, a Democrat, declined to be interviewed. On his campaign website, he listed his top three issues as defending reproductive freedom, protecting the right to vote and fighting corporate greed.
In a televised debate, Mr. DePasquale said Pennsylvanians are familiar with his record of fighting for them. “People know I have the spine,” he said.
JARED SOLOMON
A fourth-term state representative from Philadelphia, Mr. Solomon, 45, declined to be interviewed. The Democrat told viewers during the same televised debate that he has taken on special interests while in Harrisburg and written tough ethics laws.
The top issues listed on his campaign website are abortion rights, voting rights and gun crime.
“I want to be your next attorney general because I want to protect our fundamental rights,” Mr. Solomon said during the debate.
JOE KHAN
An attorney, Mr. Khan previously was solicitor for Bucks County, a federal prosecutor for 10 years, and an assistant district attorney for six years. He declined to be interviewed.
Mr. Khan, 48, a Democrat from Doylestown in Bucks County, says on his campaign website that he wants to tackle corporate and political corruption and keep families safe.
During the televised debate, he said that not only is he the most qualified candidate, but his campaign is closing “the enthusiasm gap that Democrats have to address” across the state.
Ford Turner: fturner@post-gazette.com
First Published: April 14, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: April 14, 2024, 12:13 p.m.
