Joe Khan’s vaunted prosecution of rapist yielded no rape conviction

When Bucks County district attorney candidate Joe Khan looks back on his career, he often recalls his experience prosecuting sex criminals. Jeffrey Marsalis, the “Match.com rapist,” repeatedly comes up as an example.

When the left-leaning Philadelphia 3.0 organization favorably announced that Khan would seek then Philadelphia Democratic District Attorney Seth Williams’s job in 2017, Marsalis’s was one of the two Khan prosecutions the group mentioned by name. 

A Swarthmore College graduate, Khan spoke to his school’s magazine The Bulletin in early 2018, months after his failed city DA run, recollecting that case among others. “Prosecuting sex crimes was a particularly tough job, but an honor and a privilege,” Khan told reporter Carol Brévart-Demm of his six years in the city District Attorney’s Office. “You’re not only trying to take a dangerous person off the street, but also serving an important role for the victims, many of them children with no father figures, nor role models.”

Brévart-Demm’s article observed Marsalis “was ultimately sentenced to life” after numerous women he apparently met said he raped him. The word “ultimately” is shouldering some heavy work there. 

Twenty-one women would eventually accuse Marsalis of sexual assault, many alleging outright rape. According to The Philadelphia Gay News, city police called him “the worst serial rapist in the city’s history.” 

Despite ten of those allegations going to trial in Philadelphia, Khan ended up securing conviction on only two counts of sexual assault in 2007, resulting in a cumulative sentence of 10.5 to 21 years imprisonment. Ten rape convictions could have easily put him away forever. 

Marsalis would only incur a guilty verdict for rape in Idaho in April 2009 after a jury found he forced himself on a 21-year-old coworker there four years earlier while she was torpid from drinking.

After his career as a city and federal prosecutor, Khan served as county solicitor in Bucks. Now a partner at the politically powerful Yardley-based Curtin & Heefner law firm and a Democratic contender to unseat incumbent GOP Bucks District Attorney Jennifer Schorn, he did not reply to a request for comment about the Marsalis case. He has nonetheless commented volubly while campaigning about the prosecutorial record of his opponent. In one recent video advertisement, he goes so far as to say she “refused to do her job.” 

His ad cites two incidents he insists Schorn could have addressed more proactively: the Sunoco/Energy Transfer pipeline discovered in January to have leaked jet fuel in Upper Makefield Township and the child abuse alleged to have taken place last year at Jamison Elementary School in the Central Bucks School District.

“Schorn failed to take action, refused to seek justice for our kids,” a saturnine female voice tells viewers. “The facts speak for themselves: We can’t trust Jennifer Schorn.” 

The Republican attorney disputed Khan’s version of the events as vacuous. On the fuel leak, she recalled he proposed creating a Bucks County environmental crimes unit, an idea she called “absurd” since the equivalent doesn’t exist in any other Pennsylvania county but exists in robust form on the state level. The state, she said, has jurisdiction over such matters and she acted accordingly.

“The reality is that every single county in this commonwealth immediately refers any potential criminal allegations that relate to environmental crimes to the [state] Attorney General’s Office, or they should, and I have done just that,” she said. “I referred it and it was immediately confirmed to be adopted and assigned to the specialty unit the week after I referred [it] on February 13.” 

On the Jamison matter, Schorn opined that Khan “knows nothing about that case,” especially as he demands that she say whether the matter was assigned to a grand jury and that she discuss it publicly. She said acquiescing to those demands would be “clear and direct violations of the law” due to grand juries’ secrecy, something she said any aspiring district attorney who is not “ill-equipped” to do the job would understand. She suggested he either doesn’t understand the law himself or is deliberately forgetting it so he can paint her as failing to perform her professional duties.

“It is troubling that a candidate who has never set foot in a criminal courtroom in Bucks, let alone prosecuted a case here, and has little ties to this community except those he forged only to advance is political agenda, would make such a patently false statement about me,” Schorn told The Independence, referring to his suggestion that she failed to do her job. “If this doesn’t raise concerns about his questionable principles, I am not sure what does.”

As to the relatively soft conviction and sentencing Khan netted in the Marsalis case, Schorn said she wouldn’t criticize a fellow prosecutor who got an underwhelming trial outcome — if he didn’t “shamelessly promote it as if that’s the gold standard for successful prosecution” while dubiously blasting her record. 

She cited her own prosecution of Falls Township resident Walter Meyerle for sexually abusing fifteen children, crimes for which he received a minimum of 494.5 years, as an example of a true victory for victims and public safety. It’s one among many that she has racked up over the years: She led the first Bucks County sex-trafficking prosecution, putting Enoch Smith behind bard for 40 to 80 years; obtained a death sentence for child murderer Jacob Sullivan; and secured a life sentence for child killer Andre Gordon, among many similarly grisly cases. 

Schorn said it’s unlikely Khan could compile as formidable a record, given the criminal justice policies he has embraced, including bail reform. The Democrat, who ran an unsuccessful primary bid for Pennsylvania attorney general last year, has supported abolishing cash bail in the past but has said this year that he wants to reform the system by hiking bail for affluent defendants.

Schorn views that kind of change as impossible — because it isn’t “change”: Bail is already adjusted upward for the wealthy, and she wants to keep it that way. DAs’ options to toughen the system more than that are limited. Eliminating bail altogether for especially dangerous defendants would be both hawkish and arguably equitable, but it can’t be done at the county level; state statute only permits outright denial of bail for first-degree murder. The only way to guarantee any fat cat can’t shell out the money to get out of jail and pose public dangers or flight risk in most cases is to set a high bail amount. 

In any case, the incumbent prosecutor doubts her rival will abandon his earlier aim of cashless bail, despite his more moderate recent rhetoric.

“He wants it both ways,” she said.

Bradley Vasoli is the senior editor of The Independence.