Patrick Dugan wants to cap his military and judicial career by becoming Philly’s top prosecutor. Can he win?

This article is the first in a two-part series profiling the candidates for Philadelphia district attorney.

Patrick Dugan was an out-of-shape 43-year-old who’d recently had surgery to remove a cancerous growth on his leg. He wasn’t exactly the ideal candidate to ship off to Iraq in 2003 in the aftermath of 9/11.

But Dugan, a paratrooper who had left the Army 15 years earlier and was working as a lawyer for Philadelphia City Council, watched from his couch as other infantrymen deployed to the Middle East. He felt like he’d abandoned his people.

So he said he sweet-talked a military doctor to pass his physical exam, and reenlisted.

It was one of many times in Dugan’s life that he was perhaps not the most obvious candidate for a job, but he jumped into the fray anyway.

Today, he’s a former judge who’s never been a prosecutor running to be Philadelphia district attorney. He’s the lone challenger taking on two-term incumbent Larry Krasner, a face of the national progressive prosecutor movement and a criminal justice reformer who’s enjoyed years of publicity.

Dugan has been branded the “tough-on-crime” candidate, and is straight from central casting. The son of a single mother, he grew up in the working-class Frankford neighborhood and served in the Army for 23 years, with assignments in Panama, South Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He counts the first day he jumped out of a plane as one of the best of his life. He drives his pickup truck to and from campaign events.

“He’s a barrel-chested American paratrooper who has been battle tested,” said former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, a friend and fellow veteran.

But Dugan and those close to him say the tough guy exterior belies an inner softness and empathy that has guided much of his life.

It led him to reenlist when he couldn’t stand sitting out. It is the reason he spent much of his judicial career overseeing diversion courts that keep low-level offenders out of jail. It’s why, when he recently lifted up his pant leg to show off the military tattoo that spans his calf, it was partially covered by socks dotted with yellow ducks. His grandchildren like his colorful socks.

And it’s why he still cries when he recalls the day in the 1960s when he watched his mother rise from her stoop to intervene in a street fight, taking the side of a smaller kid who was being beaten by bigger ones.

“I am the guy that will get off the steps,” Dugan said. “But I have empathy and compassion … people look at me and they think, ‘Oh, my God, he’s a tough guy.’ And I’m not that person. I will come help you. I will jump into the fire.”

At age 64, Dugan didn’t expect to give up his job as a Philadelphia Municipal Court judge after 17 years to launch an uphill campaign against an incumbent who’s previously won reelection in a landslide. But he said he feels compelled to take on Krasner, who he believes has mismanaged the district attorney’s office and implemented policies that have dragged down the city.

If not for Krasner, Dugan said, he probably wouldn’t be running. His political aspirations start and end with the May 20 Democratic primary. No Republican is running, meaning the primary will be decisive.

Dugan, who has a lower political profile than Krasner, is no doubt the underdog. He is backed by a handful of politically powerful labor unions, but the city’s Democratic Party hasn’t endorsed either candidate and the police union, which in the past forcefully opposed Krasner, has yet to weigh in.

The dynamic has made for a more subdued campaign than the last two times Krasner’s name was on the ballot. In 2017, Krasner was a criminal defense attorney who won a seven-way race. Four years ago, he beat a former prosecutor whom he’d fired, making for a race marked by personal attacks.

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There are plenty of detractors who see in Dugan a rollback of progressive policies that Krasner put in place, and Krasner has said Dugan’s criticisms stem from an unwillingness to reform the office. To be sure, Dugan would be a more moderate, traditional style prosecutor, though he says he would retain some of Krasner’s popular programs, such as a team that works to free wrongly incarcerated people.

The question for Dugan as he tries to mount a successful citywide campaign is whether he can balance both sides of himself to win over voters who want different things: the tough top prosecutor, and the empath who values second chances.

It was the early 1980s, and Dugan felt out of place. He was a teenager studying to be a teacher at West Chester University, but was a city kid at heart — he knew all about food stamps and had gone to St. Joseph’s Preparatory School on a scholarship.

He dropped out of college and found a sense of belonging in the Army. He was enamored of training sessions in helicopters, and signed up to be an airborne infantryman and parachute a thousand feet through the sky, what he calls “the greatest natural high you can ever experience.”

Dugan was deployed abroad twice in the ‘80s, once for a year to South Korea. A few years later, he was in Panama, jumping out of planes in the jungle and sometimes swimming in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans in the same day. He left just before the invasion in 1989 to return to Philadelphia, finally get his degree, and go to law school at age 30.

After graduating from Rutgers Law School in Camden, Dugan worked in private practice, then landed in the office of former City Councilmember Rick Mariano, his first foray into politics. Mariano, a Democrat, hired often from veterans networks.

As Dugan recalls, City Hall was “a lot of smiles and backstabbing” — an environment he didn’t feel bad about leaving after 9/11, when he reenlisted.

In 2004, he shipped off to Iraq, where he worked in a civil affairs unit on democracy building missions. He ran toy drives and women’s empowerment seminars, and he helped Iraqis build a City Council in Mosul.

“I remember him always being so eager to get out there,” said Capt. David Fields, who served alongside Dugan in Iraq. “He was never one to back down.”

Dugan’s days in Philadelphia politics informed his work. He worked closely with an Iraqi governor, Osama Kashmoula, and wanted him to come to Philadelphia and meet with Ed Rendell, then the Pennsylvania governor, and then-U.S. Rep. Bob Brady. The Iraqi delegation could learn about governance from his home city’s dignitaries.

But two months before the trip, Kashmoula was assassinated while on a convoy to Baghdad. Dugan wears a silver bracelet bearing his name to this day.

He returned to the Middle East for a second tour — this one in Afghanistan, where he served as a military lawyer and handled claims filed by Afghanis against the U.S.

Some of their stories shook him. He vividly recalls one desperate man who was missing a leg — it had been blown off in a minefield — who yelled in broken language that Afghanistan was better off under the Russians.

Dugan says he took those experiences with him to the bench. Shortly after he came home, Dugan was in 2007 appointed by Rendell to a vacancy on Philadelphia Municipal Court. He was joined at his inauguration by his mother, Jacqueline, who had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer.

In front of a line of cameras, Dugan emotionally told his mother she was responsible for his achievements. She died three years later.

Dugan was elected to a full term in 2009, and established a Veterans Court in Philadelphia after reading about a similar program in Buffalo. The idea was to divert veterans who faced charges for low-level offenses away from the criminal justice system and into treatment for addiction or mental illness.

For more than a decade, Dugan heard cases, and tried to build relationships with defendants who came before him, often telling them of his own service.

Roc Whitted, a mentor to Veterans Court participants and a retired police chaplain, said he’ll never forget the expression on Dugan’s face when they learned that a veteran who came through his courtroom had overdosed and died. It was as if Dugan blamed himself.

“He shows a real concern for the people that sit before him,” Whitted said. “I don’t think there’s another judge around that has the empathy, the feeling, and the love for so many veterans that he does.”

Hundreds of veterans graduated from the court since its inception, and it led to a 20% reduction in recidivism among participants, according to a city report last year. Seven out of 10 graduates reported their mental health had improved.

In 2019, Dugan was elected by his peers to serve as president judge of the Municipal Court, the smaller of the two levels of court that make up Philadelphia’s First Judicial District. Municipal Court judges preside over misdemeanor criminal cases and initial hearings for defendants facing felonies. They also oversee cases generally not handled by the district attorney’s office, such as landlord-tenant disputes, traffic citations, and small civil claims.

Months after Dugan took the helm, the courts were thrown into chaos as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Proceedings were scrambled amid social-distancing rules, but city officials wanted to reduce the prison population to curb transmission of the virus.

Dugan worked alongside Krasner’s office to establish a fast-track court for defendants deemed suitable for release, such as nonviolent offenders who completed minimum sentences or were held on cash bail for low-level crimes. He said it was important for him to hear cases in the prison himself — to “lead from the front.”

“I’m not going to want my squad to carry something that I can’t carry,” Dugan said, referencing lessons learned in the Army. “So I’m going to carry that heavy rucksack.”

Other judges noticed.

“He felt that the prisoners needed to see judges out there to know that the judicial system didn’t turn their back on them,” said now-retired Judge James DeLeon. “Without asking, he stepped forward.”

Thousands of cases crossed Dugan’s desk, but one stands out as the most high-profile.

In 2013, he acquitted Philadelphia Police Lt. Jonathan Josey, who was charged with assault for hitting a woman at the city’s Puerto Rican Day Parade in an incident that was caught on video. He faced criticism both for the decision and for not recusing himself from the case. His wife, Nancy Farrell Dugan, was on the police force at the time and reportedly in the courtroom during the trial.

Some voters still remember. Terri Tumulty, 72, of Northeast Philadelphia, said she recalls the case vividly — it was the first thing she thought of when she saw Dugan was running for district attorney. She strongly opposes his candidacy.

“We need to remind everybody, especially the Puerto Rican community, who this man is and what he did,” Tumulty said. ”I don’t take people by their word, I take people by their actions... He’s going to protect cops who do bad things.”

Dugan acknowledges the case could be a liability for his campaign. But he stands by the decision, saying “judges have to make tough calls.” He said he found the officer not guilty based on the evidence presented to him, including testimony that the incident didn’t rise to the level of assault.

While Dugan’s opponents are likely to seize on the case and portray him as opposed to holding police accountable for misconduct, he says that isn’t so. He said he “probably” voted for Krasner in 2017 and was excited when he first took office.

But that quickly soured. He grew frustrated with Krasner and what he described as an overall “lack of integrity in that office.”

Rendell, a former district attorney, said Dugan has a winning message, but is facing a “tough fight.” He questioned whether Dugan could raise enough money to win, despite being “a hardworking guy who has pulled off some surprises in his career.”

Dugan said he’s clear-eyed about his “mission.” Name recognition could be his biggest problem — when Krasner enters a room, he said, most voters know who he is. Not the case for Dugan.

He’s still strategizing as he goes. In the first two public debates, Krasner got under Dugan’s skin, at one point nearly calling him a racist. Dugan exploded, citing his own racially diverse family and suggesting that if they were not in public, a fight might be one way to settle their differences.

A few days later, Dugan said he’s trying to tame that tough guy side.

“Frankly, I have to not be Paddy Dugan from Frankford,” he said, “and just be the judge.”