Justice Reform DAs Overseeing Stark Decline in Felony Convictions, Including Murder

Over the past five years, cities across the country have elected liberal district attorneys with a focus on criminal justice reform such as decriminalizing certain misdemeanor infractions like marijuana possession and eliminating cash bail. Much of it is driven by a heavily funded campaign led by financier George Soros, who put around $3 million into seven district attorney campaigns in 2016.

Yet their changes are also leading to distinct declines in felony enforcement unrelated to marijuana decriminalization and cash bail—including gun crimes and homicide.

Rather than not taking cases for misdemeanor offenses, more and more felony cases are withdrawn or lost at trial. In some cases the attorneys just simply don’t show up to trial. Or for one case in Mississippi, the Soros-funded district attorney was arrested for assisting the defense with their case.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In Philadelphia, the district attorney’s office run by Larry Krasner since 2017 would see a decline in guilty verdicts for all violent offenses from 2018 to 2022 based on data from the DA’s office. What was once a 38 to 40 percent guilty rate is now 24 to 27 percent. Krasner was heavily funded by Soros, receiving $1.7 million for his 2016 race.

For firearm possession, it went from 65 percent to 35 percent. For homicides, it went from 80 percent to a low of 57 percent in 2020.

The city of brotherly love has struggled for years with a high homicide rate that has only gotten worse since 2020. The clearance rate for murders—the number of arrests per incident—has been a middling 42 percent, meaning that most murders go unsolved.

The Philly DA’s office put out a press release in September of 2022 to rebut some claims that it wasn’t enforcing the law, stating that the office prosecutes 99 percent of non-fatal shootings it receives as cases. For cases that pass a preliminary hearing, the homicide conviction rate was a respectable 87 percent. Prosecution during the preliminary hearing is also led by the Philadelphia DA’s office.

Yet, the Philly DA’s office has lost—not dismissed in preliminary hearings, but a court finding the defendant not guilty—45 homicide shooting cases since 2018, or about 11.4 percent of cases that weren’t dismissed or withdrawn—from a preliminary hearing or otherwise. During the previous district attorney’s tenure from 2015 and 2017, the office never lost a homicide shooting case.

In January of 2022, the Philadelphia Office of the Controller released a report on the dwindling clearance rate for gun crimes in the city. With more shootings in the city, fewer gun-related crimes have led to an arrest, which impacts the ability to solve other gun-related crimes, like homicide.

Based on the numbers published there, convictions for firearms-related crimes, described as violations of violations of the Uniform Firearms Act (VUFA), have dropped substantially, going from 60 percent in 2017 to 42 percent in 2020.

Saint Louis, Missouri

In St. Louis, Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner was elected to office in 2017, and she would oversee a steady stream of dropped felony cases and lower conviction rates. The case dismissal rate would go from a reasonable 10 to 15 percent to almost 40 percent in 2021 based on statistics from the Missouri court system. Prosecutor turnover in her office was reported at times to be 100 percent.

All the while, the city has seen a resurgence in crime. In 2021, St. Louis would see the largest number of violent crimes in a decade.

While the Philadelphia DA’s office blamed preliminary hearings, Gardner’s office sometimes just didn’t show up for trial. In one homicide case, the judge admonished the circuit attorneys’ office for, “essentially abandon[ing] its duty to prosecute those it charges with crimes.” Another case was dismissed because the prosecuting attorneys simply failed to provide the defense with documents.

Chicago, Illinois

In Chicago, Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx has been at odds over its prosecutorial discretion for some time now, and Foxx defended the office’s choices, stating that her department chose to focus less on misdemeanors and cold cases and more on crimes of violence. While cold cases can sometimes be more difficult to prove, there’s no reason why a prosecuting office would not want to prosecute them.

Yet even with its supposed focus on violent crime, her office dropped 8.1 percent of its homicide cases, compared to 5.3 percent based on an analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune. In 2022, they declined to prosecute almost 140 homicide cases.

In 2016 pre-Foxx, that number was around 20. Guilty verdicts for all felony offenses have been in stark decline, going from almost 90 percent to below 30 percent in 2020.

Chicago’s Low Clearance Rate

With the focus on the Foxx administration’s approach to criminal justice, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the research firm Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) would release a report in 2019 on the Chicago police department’s clearance rate.

Since 2014, murders in Chicago were increasing at a substantial rate and the police department’s clearance rate was steadily declining. Effectively, the department was solving the same number of cases each year and not able to take on more murder cases.

Chicago has the highest number of homicides in the U.S., but a smaller homicide rate because of the city’s size. While the number of police officers is comparable with other major cities—about 5 officers per thousand residents—the city has few detectives to work murder cases.

Based on the PERF report, detectives make up 8.4 percent of the Chicago police department, and there were less than two detectives for each homicide in the city in 2017. That’s lower than New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. All of which have substantially fewer homicides and much higher clearance rates.

San Francisco, California

Like the others, Chesa Boudin would take over the district attorneys’ office in San Francisco, and immediately felony convictions would begin to shrink. While felony prosecutions would be at a similar rate to his predecessor, substantially fewer cases would lead to a guilty verdict.

What was once a 71 percent conviction rate in 2019 would drop below 49 percent by 2022. During his tenure, San Francisco would see a large jump in homicides, homelessness, and overdoses. In a pushback to Boudin’s approach, a successful recall election led to him being removed from office in 2022.