Washington (CNN) — President Donald Trump’s plan to combat crime in Washington, D.C., with more federal force has led to a deluge of cases flooding already maxed-out courts in the city.
The D.C. U.S. attorney’s office, led by former Fox News anchor and Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, has encouraged its prosecutors to bring more cases to federal court with the most serious charges they can pursue. Defense attorneys across the city believe weaker cases are now being brought into the system as smaller infractions are bumped up to more serious charges.
Prosecutors in Washington have also been instructed to push for more people to remain behind bars before their case is heard in court – despite a longstanding approach of courts keeping people accused of non-violent or petty crimes out of jail unless they’re convicted.
Overall, Trump’s federal takeover of D.C. law enforcement is straining the city’s jail, federal court and its local Superior Court, which is already down 13 judges – vacancies Trump is in charge of filling because of Washington’s status as the seat of the federal government.
In a detention hearing at federal court on Tuesday, magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui addressed the surge of prosecutions. Faruqui admonished the Department of Corrections for keeping a woman locked up for nearly 24 hours despite his order releasing her, and has noted how the Trump-backed crackdown is exacerbating existing issues with the D.C. jail.
“The systems in place are not keeping up with the volume coming in,” Faruqui said in a different hearing Tuesday.
Failures to indict
The increase in cases has also positioned the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office for moments of potential failure as both judges and juries closely scrutinize charges.
In one case this month – related to an FBI agent and an immigration officer allegedly scrapping with a detainee – prosecutors failed to secure an indictment from the grand jury three times, a highly unusual outcome.
“The burden is on us to prove these cases,” Pirro said when asked about the case at a press conference this week. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t. So be it,” Pirro said. “That’s the way the process works.”
Pirro’s team has also reportedly failed to secure an indictment in what has become a notorious case of a D.C. resident throwing a sandwich at a federal law enforcement officer, according to the Associated Press.
The alleged sandwich-assaulter, Sean Dunn, had been charged by criminal complaint with a felony assault, and prosecutors hoped the grand jury would greenlight an indictment so the case could proceed with the felony. Pirro’s office can try again in the coming days, despite the initial rebuke from the D.C. residents on the grand jury.
Higher rates of detention
Another case from the first week of the Trump administration’s crime crackdown highlights how D.C.’s federal prosecutors are seeking to detain defendants in circumstances they may not have before.
A man arrested in connection with damaging a light fixture at a restaurant is now facing felony charges for allegedly threatening to kill Trump. And after the Justice Department argued this week to keep him behind bars pending trial, a federal magistrate judge said the prosecutors failed to demonstrate how the man could be a threat to the community.
The man, Edward Dana, was arrested in Northwest D.C. after the restaurant incident, according to prosecutors’ court filings. While in custody, he said he was intoxicated and had intellectual disabilities. In the back seat of a Metropolitan Police Department cruiser, he went on an at-times unintelligible rant, singing, and making the alleged presidential threat.
According to prosecutors’ description of bodycam footage, Dana said, “I’m not going to tolerate fascism,” then made incoherent sounds, and added, “that means killing you, officer, killing the President, killing anyone who stands in the way of our Constitution.”
The US attorney’s office in D.C. later filed the federal charge and he was re-arrested.
A federal magistrate judge soon ordered his release, but the Justice Department asked a district judge to overturn that decision and keep him behind bars to “protect the safety” of the D.C. community.
The district judge upheld the decision and released Dana to house arrest with GPS tracking.
Uptick in cases, strain on the system
In the past two weeks, the number of new defendants appearing in both D.C.’s Superior Court and its federal court have ballooned.
Normally, the city’s federal district court would see as many as a half-dozen new criminal defendants a week. Now, the U.S. attorney’s office has nearly that many arrestees a day, even into the double digits, according to court records and sources familiar with the court.
In the last two weeks, however, many of the new arrests in federal court involved defendants’ interactions with federal officials from agencies as diverse as the FBI, Park Police and immigration authorities fanning across the city.
“It’s a real mess right now,” AJ Kramer, the federal public defender for D.C., told CNN of the overwhelmed judicial process.
At DC’s local Superior Court, where Pirro’s office also prosecutes criminal cases, lists of those detained each day has exceeded 100 on multiple occasions since Trump’s recent crackdown began. That’s roughly double the number of new criminal defendants the court used to see on a given day, people familiar with the court tell CNN.
New cases are heard in a tight windowless room in the basement of D.C.’s Superior Court, as family members and others from the public huddle in long pews to watch the judge on duty quickly decide if people need to stay behind bars or can be sent home.
“It’s going to take a little bit of time,” the presiding judge told a room full of family members and others from the public Monday after warning them that he had 125 cases to get through during the daily Superior Court hearing.
‘It is simply not sustainable’
The new cases being brought across the street to D.C.’s federal court add an onslaught of cases to the city’s already-overburdened federal public defenders’ office, which is assigned cases when defendants can’t financially afford an attorney.
“It has been a nightmare,” a source familiar with the situation inside the D.C. federal public defender’s office told CNN, on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “It has overloaded the entire system,” the source said. “It has been pretty unmanageable. The strain on the court system is real. The rate of new cases coming is not sustainable.”
It’s not difficult for police to make arrests and for prosecutors to quickly file charges, frontloading courts with new cases. But it takes longer for cases to move through the process, which might result in the grand jury refusing to indict or prosecutors deciding to drop a case, after weeks or months of additional strain on the courts.
“I don’t think many of these cases are going to survive,” the source said.
In strategizing ways to relieve the burden, the source said there have been conversations inside the DC public defenders’ office about asking their colleagues in neighboring Virginia and Maryland to pick up some of the new DC-based cases.
Members of the federal public defender service also expressed concerns about its ability to provide effective defense lawyering, at a time of budget cuts.
“Without more resources, we run the risk of falling short of our constitutional obligation to provide effective assistance of counsel,” a group of assistant federal public defenders in D.C. said in a statement provided to CNN on Tuesday.
The system is so backlogged that felony criminal cases are now being scheduled for 2027 in D.C.’s Superior Court, potentially leaving those defendants to wait behind bars for years until a trial or plea deal in their case.
“It is simply not sustainable – it is not now – and only stands to grow worse, not so much for us, but for those we serve,” Douglas Buchanan, spokesperson for D.C.’s local court system, said. “Justice delayed – and justice denied.”
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