Former Philly police officer convicted of perjury for lying about traffic stop

A former Philadelphia police officer was convicted of perjury on Tuesday after a jury found that he lied under oath about where he recovered a gun during a traffic stop.

Daniel Levitt, 52, was found guilty by jurors who rejected his account that he had discovered a handgun protruding from a backpack in plain view during a 2021 stop in Northwest Philadelphia.

The following year, Levitt became the first officer charged after an internal police review raised concerns that some officers may have improperly searched vehicles and people before recovering firearms. Levitt, a 12-year veteran of the force at the time, was fired after his arrest, his attorney said.

On Wednesday, District Attorney Larry Krasner said the conviction — the third his administration has secured against a police officer accused of perjury — meant Levitt would never again serve as a police officer.

“If you wear a badge and perjure yourself … you tear down trust in the profession," Krasner said during a news conference. But Levitt’s conviction, he added, “lifts up every other police officer who does the right thing and tells the truth.”

The case against Levitt did not turn on whether the gun was illegal: Tyshon Butts, the vehicle’s passenger, admitted possessing the Glock 17 without a license to carry it, prosecutors said. (Prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Butts after the allegations against Levitt surfaced.)

Instead, the dispute centered on where Levitt found the weapon.

Prosecutors charged Levitt with perjury, making unsworn false statements, and official oppression. They said he falsely contended in police paperwork justifying his search that the oversized handgun — fitted with an extended 33-round magazine — was jutting out of a backpack and visible without opening it.

He later repeated that account under oath during Butts’ preliminary hearing. “When I peeked in,” Levitt testified, “I saw a magazine poking out of the bag.”

But Assistant District Attorney Clarke Beljean told jurors that the evidence told a different story.

During the two-day trial, Beljean presented body-worn camera footage from other responding officers that showed Butts zipping shut a backpack decorated with oversized shark eyes and teeth before placing it behind the front seats of the minivan while the officers questioned him.

The footage later showed Levitt telling another officer that the gun had been “sticking out” of a bag as he removed the backpack from the vehicle.

“Please believe your own eyes and your own ears,” Beljean told jurors during closing arguments, adding that officers did not have a warrant to search the vehicle or the backpack.

“Daniel Levitt swore to tell the truth, didn’t, and knew that he didn’t,” Beljean concluded.

Even so, the prosecutors’ case also contained significant evidentiary gaps, including the absence of key materials jurors might have used to evaluate how Levitt’s search unfolded. Those omissions became part of the defense argument that the jury was being asked to find wrongdoing without the necessary facts.

For example, although Beljean sought to introduce Levitt’s body-worn camera footage from the search, defense attorney Coley Reynolds objected, and the judge barred jurors from seeing it.

That footage would have shown that Levitt’s camera was obscured for a nearly two-minute span of time as he searched the van, purportedly for a third occupant, according to court records. It also captured Levitt saying, “Whose bag is this with the wallet in it?,” roughly 30 seconds before he announced that he had found a weapon, according to the documents.

Prosecutors also did not present the internal affairs report that prompted the criminal investigation, or expert testimony explaining why opening a zipped backpack under those circumstances would have violated search-and-seizure rules.

Before jurors began deliberating, Reynolds argued that prosecutors had failed to present sufficient evidence to support any of the three charges against Levitt. And he noted that prosecutors had not introduced into evidence police paperwork Levitt prepared that they alleged was false.

Common Pleas Court Judge Natasha Taylor-Smith agreed in part, dismissing charges of official oppression and unsworn false statement and leaving jurors to decide only the perjury count.

In closing arguments, Reynolds said prosecutors had failed to prove that Levitt knowingly lied.

He told jurors that multiple bags were inside the minivan and that prosecutors never established that Levitt was referring specifically to the shark backpack when he said the gun had been sticking out of a bag. Footage showed at least three other bags in the back of the vehicle, he said. And in court Tuesday, another officer who was at the scene testified that he did not see a gun protruding from the shark backpack.

Taken together, Reynolds argued, the evidence suggested the gun was not in the backpack at all but instead was recovered from another bag in the vehicle that may already have been open.

If Levitt had identified the wrong bag while testifying, Reynolds said, that would be a mistake, not a crime.

“You can be mistaken when you testify,” he told the jury.

After jurors returned their verdict, attorneys were called back into court and informed that the jury foreman had belatedly disclosed that he worked for a law firm that represents the city and the District Attorney’s Office in unrelated opioid litigation. The judge questioned jurors individually and concluded that the foreman’s employment had not affected their deliberations.

Reynolds said he was disappointed with the verdict and planned to appeal. A police union official did not immediately return a request for comment.

Of the arrests referred to the district attorney’s office for review alongside Levitt’s in 2021, Levitt is the only officer to have been charged to date, according to a spokesperson for the office.

His case took nearly four years to reach a resolution. Court records show a Municipal Court judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence at a preliminary hearing in June 2022. Later that same year, a Common Pleas Court judge rejected prosecutors’ bid to refile charges against him.

But prosecutors appealed, and the Superior Court of Pennsylvania in December 2024 ruled the lower court judge had erred.

In its order sending the case back to Commons Pleas Court, the appeals judges wrote that “evidence ... supports the inference that Levitt unzipped the shark-teeth bag without legal authority.