“How could they erase the case?” asked this woman, who was forced into a sex act at gunpoint 23 years ago. (Michael S. Wirtz / Staff Photographer)
Twenty-three years later, the woman still trembles when she remembers the attack.
The man pushed his way into her Kensington house at gunpoint, slapped her so hard her glasses shattered, then forced her to have oral sex.
The alleged attacker, Francisco Sanchez, fled before trial, but the woman says she never gave up hope that one day he would be tried and convicted.
"I wished all my life that they would catch him," she said in a recent interview. "I would go to court to testify and do as much as possible to send the man to jail."
But in a sweeping move to lower Philadelphia's staggering tally of 47,000 fugitives, top court officials have quietly dropped criminal charges against Sanchez and more than 19,000 other defendants who skipped court years ago.
At the urging of Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille and District Attorney Seth Williams, Philadelphia judges closed criminal cases and canceled fugitive bench warrants for thousands of accused drug dealers, drunken drivers, thieves, prostitutes, sex offenders, burglars, and other suspects.
The withdrawn cases date to 1998 and earlier.
"They were clogging up the system," said Castille, a former Philadelphia district attorney. "You're never going to find these people. And if you do, are you going to prosecute them? The answer is no."
The woman attacked in Kensington was astounded by the decision.
"How could they erase the case?" she asked after Inquirer reporters told her the criminal charges had been withdrawn. "I was a victim. There were lots of victims. It's not right."
The newspaper also located several Philadelphia bail jumpers around the country and told them their cases had been dismissed.
"I'm ecstatic," said Reginald Newkirk, who had been facing two drunken-driving charges. Reached at his current home in Watha, N.C., Newkirk was told that the charges had been withdrawn. "I'm glad to hear that."
In Newkirk's 1991 arrests, police determined that his blood-alcohol levels were 0.273 and 0.277 - almost three times the legal threshold for intoxication at the time. Asked whether he had been drunk at the time, Newkirk, now 61, replied, "More or less."
Another fugitive, Alfred Carter, who fled in 1989 before he was sentenced for a strong-arm robbery, is now living in Washington.
His conviction was set aside in an attack in which he admitted he left his victim dazed, weeping, and bleeding on a sidewalk in West Philadelphia.
"That's good," said Carter, 60. "I'm glad it's dropped."
With the mass purging, the officials have cut by more than 40 percent Philadelphia's massive tally of 47,000 fugitives. The Inquirer highlighted that figure - and the courts' dysfunctional bail system - in its investigative project on the Philadelphia courts published last year, titled "Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied."
Dennis Bartlett, executive director of a trade group for private bail insurers, called the purging "probably the greatest act of general absolution in the history of the city."
"These perpetrators got away with it, basically," said Bartlett, a critic of Philadelphia's government-run bail system. "The citizens should be left breathless that in one fell swoop, the courts absolved thousands of people of crimes that they committed."
But Castille, Williams, top judges, and court administrators said wiping out old files would enable the system to focus on more pressing cases. "It's just being real," Williams said. "None of them were cases where serious bodily injury was caused to somebody. None of them were homicides."
While the District Attorney's Office said it took pains to vet the dismissed cases and exclude violent offenses, The Inquirer's review found that serious cases were dismissed.
The dismissals are not the same as acquittals, but are simply a decision not to prosecute by the district attorney. Judicial approval was required to dismiss the cases.
On Friday, Joseph McGettigan, Williams' top aide, said that prosecutors would reexamine the serious sexual offenses brought to the office's attention by The Inquirer. He said there was "no question" that they should not have been withdrawn given the criteria established for the mass purge.
"We certainly would not rule out reopening and recharging in these matters," McGettigan said.
