A veteran lawyer in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has been disbarred in the region’s federal courts after a panel of judges concluded he “lied repeatedly” while seeking to overturn the death sentence of a man who killed an East Mount Airy couple in their home and left their infant daughter inside to die.
Paul George, an assistant district attorney who handles appellate cases, was a key player in his office’s attempts to have Robert Wharton’s death penalty reversed so he could serve a life sentence instead.
U.S. District Judge Mitchell Goldberg denied that request, but not before finding that District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office had provided incomplete and misleading information in its efforts to free Wharton from death row.
After Goldberg made his decision, George and a colleague who handled the case faced federal disciplinary proceedings to examine whether their conduct — which was also criticized by an appeals court — was intentionally deceptive.
As part of that process, three federal judges concluded earlier this year that George’s actions were “misleading and dishonest,” saying he had lied to Goldberg about key facts, “flouted the interests of the public and the victims’ families,” and acted as the “quarterback” of efforts by the district attorney’s office to undo or undermine all death penalty cases.
“George’s conduct was the result of a ‘selfish or dishonest motive’ — placing the DAO’s policy priorities above its professional and prosecutorial responsibilities,” wrote U.S. District Judges Paul S. Diamond, Gerald J. Pappert, and John M. Gallagher. They recommended that George be barred from practicing in the region’s federal courts, and Chief Judge Wendy Beetlestone affirmed that in an October order.
George has denied the accusations and last month filed an appeal. His attorneys acknowledged in court documents that he had made mistakes in his handling of Wharton’s case, but said the opinion recommending his disbarment was based on a broader set of “extraordinary allegations” that lacked evidence and targeted the office he worked for.
George has displayed “exceptional legal skills and the highest level of professional ethics and honesty” during his 48-year legal career, his attorneys wrote. He is scheduled to retire at the end of this year.
Krasner said in an interview that he was largely unable to comment because most of the disciplinary matter had unfolded under seal. But he said that George’s career “has been conducted vigorously and ethically,” and that he believed the appeals court would find that the opinion criticizing George was filled with “factually and legally incorrect” statements.
“We will continue to try to be fair each and every day, and, as change makers often do, we will face the consequences of making change from people who could’ve made it, but didn’t, in their day,” Krasner said.
The disciplinary saga is the latest chapter in the unusually protracted fallout from Wharton’s death penalty appeal, and it might not be the last.
George’s colleague Nancy Winkelman — another supervisor in the district attorney’s law division — has also been the subject of a disciplinary inquiry in federal court for her role in the Wharton matter. Records in her case remain under seal.
The documents connected to George’s case were also supposed to remain secret, but they became public this week when aspects of his appeal were publicly filed in court. On Thursday, his attorney, David Rudovsky, filed court documents to have the entire record of the underlying disciplinary proceeding made public.
George became involved in the Wharton matter in 2019, while Wharton was appealing his death sentence in federal court.
Wharton had been convicted along with a codefendant in the January 1984 strangulation and drowning deaths of Bradley and Ferne Hart. A jury concluded that Wharton killed the couple over a disputed debt, then turned off the heat in their home and left the couple’s 7-month-old baby, Lisa, to freeze to death. She survived.
In the decades before Krasner took office, the district attorney’s office had consistently opposed Wharton’s attempts to overturn his conviction and sentence.
But Krasner said on the campaign trail that he would “never pursue a death sentence in any case.” And after he was sworn in, his office changed its stance on the Wharton case, saying it had “carefully reviewed the facts and the law” and agreed that Wharton should be spared from death row.
Goldberg did not immediately agree, and wrote in court documents at the time that the district attorney’s office had not sufficiently explained its reasoning for its “complete reversal of course.”
He then asked the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office to provide materials he said the district attorney’s office was not sharing. And after investigating, the attorney general’s office said it found evidence including documents detailing Wharton’s past attempts to escape from a courtroom — information that Goldberg said would have been crucial to his decision, but that George and Winkelman later said they were not aware of.
The attorney general’s office also said Krasner’s office had misled Goldberg about its communications with the victims’ relatives. Although the district attorney’s office gave the impression that the Hart family supported its change in stance on the death penalty, the truth was that prosecutors had spoken only to one relative, and never contacted the couple’s only surviving child, Lisa Hart-Newman, who vehemently opposed the idea of lessening Wharton’s sentence.
George later acknowledged that was a mistake, and Goldberg ordered Krasner to write apology letters to the Harts’ relatives.
In the disciplinary opinion filed earlier this year, the three-judge panel criticized George’s conduct throughout the case, saying that he “repeatedly lied” to Goldberg and that his efforts nearly undercut the integrity of a duly imposed jury verdict.
And, in an unusually pointed fashion, they ascribed a motive to his actions — accusing George of flouting legal guardrails to advance the policy interests of Krasner’s office.
“Upon the current District Attorney’s first election … the DAO established a policy, with Paul George at quarterback, to undermine duly imposed death sentences challenged in post-conviction proceedings,” the judges wrote. “George filed the concession in Wharton pursuant to that policy, not as the result of any review, careful or otherwise, of the facts and the law.”
George said in court documents that was not true, and his attorneys denied there has ever been an office policy opposing all capital sentences.
Krasner also said it was “flatly untrue” that his office has ever had a policy against the death penalty, and he denied that the committee he formed to review capital cases — which George once served on — was designed to undo such sentences.
“We follow essentially the same process as our predecessors, who routinely supported the death penalty and who were usually wrong,” Krasner said. “We actually try to be fair all the time. And that committee has concluded on many occasions that the death penalty should be reversed; it has also concluded with the law division in individual cases that the death penalty had to be affirmed. Those are the facts.”
George’s disbarment in federal court has not affected his ability to practice in state court, though George, 75, has already begun to wind down his office duties ahead of his retirement, his attorneys wrote in court documents.
They said that the penalty imposed against him was unwarranted and should be reversed.
“To label Mr. George as a liar, and by disbarment, place him among the worst of the worst lawyers in our community, is highly disproportionate and offends basic tenets of justice,” his lawyers wrote.
The federal judges who recommended his discipline disagreed.
“In the final years of his career,” they wrote, George “used [his] experience to circumvent and subvert, in misleading and dishonest ways, verdicts rendered by judges and juries who heard the evidence and applied the law.”
