Soros-Backed Philly DA Larry Krasner's Death Penalty Problem Just Blew Up Again
By Ben SmithIn January 1984, Robert Wharton and an accomplice forced their way into a Philadelphia home at knifepoint, then spent hours torturing, strangling, and drowning Bradley and Ferne Hart. On the way out, they turned off the heat. The couple's seven-month-old daughter was left alone in the dead of winter. She was found three days later, dehydrated and barely breathing. Wharton confessed. A jury sentenced him to death.
Forty years later, a top official in the Philadelphia District Attorney's office tried to get him off death row and lied to a federal judge to do it. Now she's paying for it. Nancy Winkelman, former supervisor of Soros-backed DA Larry Krasner's Law Division, has been suspended from federal court for three years. A disciplinary panel found she knowingly misled a federal judge and looked the other way while a subordinate did the same.
Prosecutors in Krasner's office moved to vacate Wharton's death sentence, claiming his trial lawyer failed to present positive prison records in mitigation. A federal court had specifically ordered both sides to account for evidence cutting the other way, including Wharton's violent escape attempt and serious misconduct behind bars. The office's Capital Case Review Committee never looked at any of it. Its memo called Wharton's prison record "exemplary."
It was not.
The disciplinary panel wrote:
"We find that Nancy Winkelman knowingly made misrepresentations to effectuate a policy of vacating all death sentences on appeal, at PCRA, or on federal habeas review. We do not credit her testimony that there is no such policy. We further find that she was willfully blind to, and complicit in, George's misrepresentations to Judge Goldberg."
When the state Attorney General's office stepped in and found the buried evidence, Winkelman didn't back down. She filed an eight-page objection calling the AG's involvement "highly aggressive" and "partisan," and kept insisting her office had done a "thorough review."
The Third Circuit had already upheld sanctions against Winkelman and her subordinate, Paul George, before disciplinary proceedings even started:
"Courts rely on lawyers' honesty; lawyers may not mislead them. But the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office did just that."
George was disbarred. The panel called him the "quarterback" of the operation. Winkelman got three years. In March 2026, Chief Judge Wendy Beetlestone signed off on the suspension.
Since 2018, Krasner's office has engineered the reversal of more than 100 convictions through post-conviction concessions, none tested by the adversarial process. The panel found the Capital Case Review Committee was a legal fig leaf, giving the office cover for decisions that had already been made on ideological grounds.
The day before news of Winkelman's suspension broke, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rebuked Krasner's office in a separate case. Prosecutors had misled judges, submitted false statements, and violated their duty of candor. The court ordered that the state AG's office must now weigh in on all future efforts by Krasner's office to vacate convictions.
Winkelman has appealed, arguing the district court used the wrong evidentiary standard and wrongly found professional conduct violations.
Krasner defended her anyway. He called her an exceptional attorney who gave up private practice to serve the public and said she "contributed mightily to needed reform." At the time of the suspension, both Winkelman and George were still on the DA's office payroll, making nearly $180,000 each.
Through all of it, the Harts' daughter, Lisa Hart-Newman, was never consulted. Krasner's office never contacted her before moving to spare her parents' killer from execution. She strongly opposed the effort. Nobody asked.
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