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Notes -
Thanks for taking the time to answer this.
The Hart murders seem to be straightforward, and the only real change I would make post-sentencing is "In fact, you and your co-accused should be taken into a room and have the shit kicked out of you", not any "poor little tyke, you were framed!" changes.
The others seem complicated and messy in the way of habitual criminals. The problem with jail house confessions, or police interviews where everyone has a strong incentive to say "It wasn't me, it was him!", is that there is too strong an incentive to lie in order to get reduced sentences/plea bargains for yourself. So claiming "I was Bill's cellmate and he told me he definitely did it all, now do I get parole like you guys promised me?" isn't worth spit in my view.
The prosecutors do seem to have been ideologically captured, at least, but the skimming I've done of that Winkelman link , I honestly can't figure out what the hell they thought they were doing, or trying to achieve.
Yeah, the prosecutor's office seems to have been more interested in getting someone, rather than necessarily getting the right guy. I've got a bit of sympathy. Funt seems like a jerk in the extent that he'll file stuff he knows is not true, rather than just being on the other side, and there's a long-standing tendency for aggressive defenses to call everything down to a sneeze Giglio material. But 'joking' about sending detectives to interview a defense lawyer is inappropriate without far great evidence of genuine illegal behavior, and some of the occlusions here did more to make the conviction riskier, rather than actually mattering.
((This points to a general problem with Brady/Giglio, where police and prosecutors have a lot of incentive to abuse it in marginal cases where they're likely to lose anyway, aka innocent people. But that's a broader 4th Amendment and 14th amendment problem.))
Krasner's team... philosophically, they're just opposed to the death penalty as a category. Charitably, that's out of a feeling that it was disproportionately applied on the basis of race, but they're really heavy on defense-oriented lawyers who just like getting thirty bites at the apple regardless of the sentence or crime, so the charitable argument isn't very strong. The court might be overstating things when they say the DAO is trying to overturn literally every death sentence -- there's a couple non-African-American death row inmates Krasner might skip, either due to the severity of their crimes or not seeing the racial nexus as applicable there -- but I wouldn't consider it a safe bet, either.
Tactically? They probably got away with it for a while, and the courts have genuinely had to fudge the rules to handle it. Toa's opinion has a dissent with multiple signatories, and that's not great in my opinion, but it means that, at least by Pennsylvanian standards, Krasner's team and behavior are not hilariously illegitimate as a tactic.
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