Pa. AG steps into murder case that gave it new power to challenge District Attorney Larry Krasner – Inquirer.com

Pa. AG steps into murder case that gave it new power to challenge District Attorney Larry Krasner  Inquirer.com

Krasner's office had supported granting a new trial to Lavar Brown, 49, who was convicted in a 2003 killing in North Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office has entered the legal fight over whether Lavar Brown — the man whose case prompted the state Supreme Court to give the office new power to challenge efforts to overturn convictions in Philadelphia — should receive a new trial. Senior Deputy Attorney General Tracy Piatkowski announced the office was stepping in during a Common Pleas Court hearing Friday, at which Brown’s attorney, Tracy Ulstad, also said she planned to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state court’s decision. Brown, 49, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the 2003 robbery and fatal shooting of Michael Richardson, a worker at a Rite Aid drugstore in North Philadelphia.

Brown was also convicted of killing Robert Crawford in 2005 and sentenced to death. In the Richardson case, a judge later vacated Brown’s sentence and ordered a new trial, after District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office supported his request . Brown’s attorneys argued that he had been denied a fair trial because the prosecution’s case relied heavily on two witnesses, one of whom had implicated another person in the killing in earlier statements