Legal News

Williams Begins to Assemble Leadership Team at DA's Office

By Brian Harris

By Amaris Elliott-Engel
Of the Legal Staff

After R. Seth Williams was sworn in today as the first African-American district attorney in Pennsylvania's 300-year history, Williams announced some of the members of his leadership team.

Williams said that Joseph "Joe" McGettigan will be the first assistant district attorney. McGettigan has worked for the Delaware County District Attorney's Office and the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office.

Williams also announced that two current members of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office will take on new leadership roles. Edward McCann, the current chief of the homicide unit, will be Williams' deputy of the trial division. 

Ann Ponterio will become chief of the homicide unit. More policy and personnel changes will be announced Tuesday.

City Controller Alan L. Butkovitz and 11 new judges on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and Philadelphia Municipal Court also were sworn in. Seventeen Common Pleas Court, Municipal Court and Traffic Court judges, who won retention elections last fall, were also sworn in.

Williams said that a recent Philadelphia Inquirer series highlighting that Philadelphia has the lowest conviction rate for major felonies among large cities in the United States reflected what he called for in his 2005 and 2009 campaigns. Williams promised that four years from now Philadelphia will no longer have the lowest conviction rate. Williams also promised to implement more preventive measures to try to prevent young offenders from escalating their misbehavior from truancy from school to worse criminal activity. Williams also promised tougher prosecution of municipal corruption. Williams also promised to assign prosecutors geographically. And Williams said he'll be seeking more funds for his office during the upcoming budget season.

But Williams said that he needed allies in the community to change criminal justice.

?True justice is always in the hands of the people. Amen?" Williams said, seeking "Amens" from the audience to affirm his remark. "We will be the agents of change. We will be the ones we're waiting for. We'll take our neighborhoods from the 'hoods and give them back to our neighbors.?

Outgoing District Attorney Lynne Abraham and Williams both avoided making explicit criticisms of each other, despite pressing by the media after Williams' swearing-in and despite Williams' electoral challenge to Abraham in the 2005 election.

Abraham said she is going to be working at a law firm and that she will run for another elected office, But Abraham declined to state which firm she'll work for or which office she'll run for. Abraham said she is not "riding off into the sunset. I'm riding off into the sunrise."

Mayor Michael A. Nutter also used the timing of a new year and the induction of a new district attorney to call for reform to the city's criminal justice system and to "break down the bureaucratic barriers, the silence, the territorialism." Nutter said a new way of dispensing justice is needed when more than 700 black men were killed in the city in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and when homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men.

Nutter also said that some progress has been made to reform the system because a stakeholder group of all the top leaders in the criminal justice system, the Criminal Justice Advisory Board, have been meeting monthly to explore and coordinate policy changes.

Families "are ripped apart by this bloody slaughter," Nutter said. "Now Police Commissioner [Charles] Ramsey, District Attorney Seth Williams and I, three African-American men ... must come to grips with what I have called in the past a black genocide."

Nutter also told the new judges sworn in today that they'll be subject to all kinds of criticism, but they won't be able to publicly respond when their judgments are questioned. But Nutter still said, while he was adding his voice to others that question judges' decisions through "Monday-morning quarterbacking," that there should not be second chances for hardened criminals.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on January 04, 2010 (boomark / email).