Collapse contractor asks Philly DA to reduce prison term to probation
The lawyer for Griffin Campbell, the demolition contractor convicted of involuntary manslaughter for his role in the deadly 2013 Center City building collapse, has petitioned District Attorney Seth Williams to reduce Campbell's 15- to 30-year prison sentence to house arrest and probation.
In an unusual petition announced Wednesday at the NAACP office in North Philadelphia, William D. Hobson cited recent civil litigation in which the jury found Campbell, 52, nominally liable for damages to the families of seven people who died and 12 who were injured in the June 5, 2013, disaster.
The NAACP supports, and is also raising money for, Campbell's appeal of his conviction to Superior Court.
"Now, with the benefit of the full and open public civil trial denied to Griffin Campbell during his criminal prosecution, the district attorney should honor its duty to seek not just convictions but justice for all," reads Hobson's five-page petition.
It's unclear whether Williams has the authority to grant Hobson's petition. Generally, such a request is made during a second-level appeal under the Post Conviction Relief Act, and would have to be approved by a judge. Campbell's case is early in the first appellate phase in Superior Court.
Hobson asked Williams to grant the petition before he leaves office in January. Last month, Williams announced that he would not seek a third term after the controversy about his long-delayed reporting of more than $175,000 in gifts from 2010 to 2015. Williams was fined $62,000 by the Philadelphia Board of Ethics.
Williams' spokesman, Cameron Kline, declined to comment on Hobson's petition.
Hobson's petition cited Williams' Feb. 8 announcement of the expansion of a unit to review the integrity of challenged criminal convictions.
After a two-year Philadelphia grand jury investigation, only two people were criminally charged as a result of the collapse of a building being demolished, which crushed the adjacent Salvation Army thrift store at 22nd and Market Streets.
Campbell, a novice North Philadelphia demolition contractor, was one. The other was Sean Benschop, 45, a North Philadelphia excavator operator he hired to speed the demolition.
Benschop pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and related charges, and testified for prosecutors at the 2015 criminal trial in which Campbell was convicted. Benschop was sentenced to 7½ to 15 years in prison.
At Campbell's trial, Hobson argued that prosecutors picked two blue-collar African American men to criminally charge while allowing the affluent white businessmen involved to avoid charges.
Richard Basciano, 91, the New York real estate speculator who owned the vacant building being demolished, asserted his constitutional right against self-incrimination and was not called before the grand jury or to testify at Campbell's trial.
Center City architect Plato A. Marinakos Jr., 50, whom Basciano hired to monitor demolition and who recommended Campbell to do the work, went to the District Attorney's Office after the collapse and got immunity from prosecution for his testimony to the grand jury and at Campbell's trial.
The District Attorney's Office has denied bias in prosecuting Campbell and Benschop, saying there was not enough evidence against anyone else to support a criminal guilty verdict "beyond a reasonable doubt."
The civil trial, where a lesser "more likely than not" evidentiary standard can support a verdict, became a mirror image of the criminal case.
On Jan. 31, the Common Pleas Court civil trial jury determined that the Salvation Army, Basciano, and Marinakos bore the most liability for those killed and injured in the disaster. The jury assigned Campbell and Benschop each just 1 percent liability.
On Feb. 8, the Salvation Army and Basciano aborted the damages phase of the trial in a $227 million settlement with the victims.