WASHINGTON (AP) — A grand jury refused to indict a man who was captured on video hurling a sandwich at a federal agent. Prosecutors dropped another case after complaints that police illegally searched a man’s satchel and found a gun. Judges, too, have balked at keeping several defendants in jail, citing weak evidence and dubious charging decisions.
President Donald Trump's crackdown on crime in the nation's capital has generated a torrent of charges against people caught up in a surge of street patrols. Judges, defense attorneys and even grand jurors are already poking holes in many cases.
“I’ve seen things over the past 72 hours that I’ve never seen in federal court,” U.S. District Judge Zia Faruqui said Wednesday during a hearing for a man who was jailed for five days on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge. Later, he added: “It feels like some sort of bizarre nightmare.”
Civil liberties are at stake, legal figures say
Trump has framed the three-week-old operation as a campaign to eradicate rampant crime and “take our capital back.” The judges and lawyers adjudicating the criminal cases say they're striving to strike a delicate balance between protecting public safety and preserving civil liberties.
Teams of federal agents and troops are patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., helping police arrest hundreds of people. The courts are struggling to keep up with the burgeoning caseload. Some people have been held in jail for days while waiting to appear before a federal judge in district court.
Edwin Jonathan Rodriguez, a 25-year-old recent college graduate, has a permit to carry a concealed firearm in Maryland. But he spent eight days in jail after police stopped his car near The Wharf neighborhood in Washington on Aug. 19 and said they found his registered gun, around 20 ounces of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.
U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey wasn't buying the government’s contention that Rodriguez is a dangerous drug dealer.
“The cases in which drug dealers register their guns are exceptionally rare,” Harvey said as he ordered Rodriguez's release. “The government’s case has got some challenges.”
Police officers and unspecified “federal partners” stopped Rodriguez because he was driving a Lexus with a license plate on the back but not the front of the vehicle, prosecutors said in a court filing. Defense attorney Joseph Scrofano accused law enforcement of jumping to baseless conclusions about the contents of the car.
“We don’t hold people based on assumptions,” Scrofano said. “We hold people based on evidence.”
Rodriguez, a budding architect who graduated from Morgan State University in December, doesn’t have a criminal record. But he faces a charge that carries a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years if he’s convicted.
The number of those arrested is rising
The White House says over 1,200 people have been arrested and 135 firearms have been seized since the surge started on Aug. 7. The city's police department says crime rates have plunged in the district, including a 60% decrease in carjackings, a 56% drop in robberies and a 58% reduction in violent crimes as of Wednesday compared to the same one-week period in 2024.
Over 30 people arrested during the crackdown have been charged in district court, where the most serious crimes are prosecuted. Approximately half of them are charged with assaulting officers, agents or National Guard members, according to an Associated Press review of court records. The rest are charged with illegally possessing guns, drugs or both.
The volume of cases in district court pales in comparison to the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, which led to charges against nearly 1,600 people in the same courthouse. But the riot arrests were staggered across four years and all 50 states, easing the burden on the court.
Former federal prosecutor Michael Romano, who spent more than 17 years at the Justice Department and helped supervise Capitol riot prosecutions, said he never had a grand jury refuse to return an indictment in one of his cases. He said the Trump administration’s efforts to appear tough on crime may have backfired with many D.C. residents, who serve on federal grand juries.
“Sometimes when you arrest people with scant evidence and you overcharge them, the community doesn’t like it and the evidence won’t support it,” said Romano, who resigned from the department earlier this year. “This illustrates the danger of having a Justice Department where attorneys can’t do their job and can’t properly evaluate whether cases are going to be good or not.”
‘We will not simply go along with the flow’
At least three people have been arrested on assault charges for spitting on federal agents or troops on patrol. A viral video captured a Justice Department attorney hurling a “sub-style” sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent. But a grand jury refused to indict him on a felony charge — an extraordinarily rare failure for prosecutors.
“Grand juries, judges, we will not simply go along with the flow,” Faruqui said.
He questioned why people have been locked up for days for relatively minor offenses that typically aren’t handled in district court. Faruqui said he shared his concerns with the leadership of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's office and hopes they can reduce the waits for detention hearings and initial court appearances.
Earlier this week, Pirro and Faruqui verbally sparred over her office's handling of a case against a man who was arrested at a Trader Joe's supermarket last month. Police officers said they followed Torez Riley into the grocery store and found two unregistered guns inside his satchel. He was charged with being a felon in possession of firearms, but Pirro's office dropped the case a week later.
During a hearing Monday, Faruqui said he was “absolutely flabbergasted” that Riley was jailed for a week before his case was dismissed. He said it was “without a doubt the most illegal search I have ever seen in my life.”
Pirro, a former Fox News host whom Trump appointed in May to lead the nation's largest U.S. Attorney's office, responded with a statement accusing Faruqui of having “a long history of bending over backwards to release dangerous felons in possession of firearms.”
On Thursday, Harvey ordered the release of a man who was arrested on Aug. 16 after a traffic stop by members of the U.S. Park Police and U.S. Marshals Service. The magistrate pressed a prosecutor to explain why the driver, Amarian Langston, was charged with illegally possessing a handgun that officers found beside a road after he crashed the vehicle. The prosecutor, Kyle McWaters, acknowledged that nobody saw Langston toss the weapon.
Prosecutors separately charged Langston's girlfriend in D.C. Superior Court, which hears less serious cases and is handling the bulk of the surge-related arrests. McWaters said the law allows the government to charge both with illegally possessing the same gun even though it allegedly belonged to the girlfriend.
Said McWaters: “I'm not saying it's an easy hill to climb, your honor.”
Michael Kunzelman, The Associated Press
