Changing with the times is a process

District Attorney Chris de Barrena-Sarobe looks back at first five months in office

WEST CHESTER >> When Chris de Barrena-Sarobe returned to the Chester County District Attorney’s Office, he found it much the same as when he left to become a federal prosecutor in 2015. Physically that is.

Institutionally, however, what went on inside the D.A.’s complex on the fourth floor of the county Justice Center had changed in a number of ways that de Barrena-Sarobe, a career prosecutor who began his profession in this same world in 2009, has now spent the better part of five months adjusting, and adjusting to.

Not only has the process of prosecuting a case — talking with law enforcement officers, reviewing files, collecting data, and readying a case to be brought before a judge or jury — evolved in the past nine years, but the landscape of the nation and the county’s criminal justice system is much different than what he left before becoming the county top elected prosecutor in 2023.

Since then, he has reorganized the top administrative staff, begun the process of filling vacancies for trial attorneys, overseeing the change to a new set of guidelines for sentencing defendants, instituting a new case management system, and getting to know the many, many organizations that work in the community.

“I am trying to take one goal at a time, and work day-by-day right now,” he said in a wide-ranging interview inside his office overlooking West Market Street. “But the question to keep in mind is what the ultimate goal is. I want this office a year from now to be an example of what a modern, mid-sized DA’s office looks like in this state. And for it to be an example of an office that can handle a volume of cases professionally, while also executing at a high level.”

The D.A.’s Office is the county agency responsible for prosecuting crimes that occur within its 579 square miles. The county is the wealthiest in the state, has a variety of diverse communities, is among the fastest growing counties in the state, and as such has an increasing number of criminal offenses from the simple, like drunk driving, to complex, like the recent arrest of a couple who stole thousands of pieces of mail from residents along the county’s northern tier and subverted their financial identities.

De Barrena-Sarobe was elected in November, only the second Democrat ever to hold the position, but in early December his predecessor, Deb Ryan, hired him as her first assistant to allow him to get a “jump start” on getting to know the people and systems in the office.

“The office is very different,” he said. “The job is very different from when I left. But I am not one who wants to come in and makes changes for the sake of making changes, and I wanted to get to know everyone who works here. I wanted to see it in action and get a feel for it in order

to makes tweaks to the system that I think will be really good for the office and good for the public.”

The simplest, but most daunting, difference was information, he said. There is a lot more of it.

“There is just so much more information, which is a good thing and a bad thing,” de Barrena-Sarobe said. There are video recorded interviews, footage from street cameras, hours of body camera tapes, and results from DNA tests and forensic interviews of victims. “It’s a great thing because it helps us make the right decision in every case. But it’s a bad thing in that it just takes more time out of a (prosecutor’s) day, and it prevents them from working on the sheer volume of cases that maybe they could have done in the past.

“Ten years ago you could have an aggravated assault case and you would have a 20- or 40-page police report and maybe you would have a recorded statement or two if you were really lucky,” he said. “Now, we record everything, as we should, all the statements. Now, we have body cam footage in all these cases to go through, to check, to understand what is going on. To watch. And so every serious case takes so much more time to get that nuanced view of and to appreciate it to do that case justice.

“There are plenty of times where you are watching body cam footage where you are watching two hours of footage where there is nothing relevant to the case one way or another,” he said. “And the only way you know that is by watching it.”

In addition, the cast of characters that his office will interact with has grown.

“We have four new criminal judges out of nine criminal judges,” he noted. “Anytime we are learning a new judge and that judge is learning us, there is a certain amount of extra work that is inherent in understanding what that judge wants on a day-to-day basis to making sure that we are delivering.”

His office has a total of 39 prosecutors, including himself, and another 64 county detectives and support staff. It has a budget of $13.4 million to handle more than 3,800 cases a year.

“We have a tremendous volume of cases, unlike what we had eight years ago when I left the office, and it’s just everything is a little bit different. When you add all of these changes up you have a lot going on right now. But it’s also really exciting because I think once we are able to integrate and adjust to these changes we are going to do a better job for Chester County.”

To help lead his office, de Barrena-Sarobe appointed veteran prosecutor Erin O’Brien as his first assistant, hired his former colleague in the D.A.’s Office Michelle V. Barone away from her position in the Philadelphia City Solicitor’s Office to become chief of staff, and moved longtime prosecutor Andrea Cardamone from that position to serve as the new chief of investigations.

But in the interview, de Barrena-Sarobe stressed that the trio, along with his five senior deputies, are not cemented in a rigid system that precludes interplay of duties.

“We are really lucky to have very senior people in this office who have been here for decades, literally decades. And they know how to get things done,” he said. “And in the end my goal is to take away the idea that one person does everything, and not have single points of failure in the office.

“Because trials happen and people go on vacation, and people take medical leave, and so on.” He continued. “No matter how much we want to pretend that we are all infallible, I want to make sure when those unexpected things happen, everything doesn’t come to a grinding halt.

“I expect everyone to work together and help me meet the needs of the office so we can do better every day,” he said.

His team is currently going through the process of filling vacancies for trial attorneys, and he hopes to be at near full staff by the summer. In the meantime, O’Brien continues to handle cases from the Child Abuse Unit, which she had supervised for several years, and other senior deputies, such as Chief Deputy Michelle Frei, also handle court cases as well as supervisory duties.

The task of maintaining a fully-staffed D.A.’s Office office has become a challenge, as the perception of the prosecutor’s role in the criminal justice system had changed, he acknowledged. But he is hopeful that the pendulum will swing back his way soon.

“Nationally, we have a lot of D.A.’s Offices that are down people,” he said. “It’s a national problem, not just a Chester County problem. Montgomery County, for example, just hired a class of I believe seven (prosecutors) because they had so many vacancies.

The reason? “My sense is that when I was in law school most of the trial attorneys were prepared to start at a D.A.’s Office or gravitated towards a D.A.’s Office. And now, there is a much larger segment of the law school trial attorneys that prefer to start at a Public Defender’s Office.

Calls for criminal justice and law enforcement reform, and protests over police misbehavior, have played into a negative impression of a career as a prosecutor, he said.

“But I think as people start to get away from the news media and start to expose themselves to the system that will change,” he said. “Public defenders play a really important role making sure that we do our job. A defense attorney’s job is making sure that we in law enforcement are doing our job. It’s a sacred role in our justice system that has been misunderstood on the flip side for years.

“I hope that our society can come to an equilibrium where we understand how important both roles are and appreciate both roles,” de Barrena-Sarobe said. “I talked with some law students recently at Temple University and they started to realize that while they may have started out going to law school think that they want to be a public defender, they realize that the one job that you can have out of law school where you job is to do the right thing is to be a prosecutor.

“The difficult part is figuring out what the right thing is,” he continued.