by Laurel Duggan
Federal prosecutors in the Washington, D.C. U.S. attorney’s office declined to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested by the police in cases that would have been tried in the D.C. Superior Court in 2022, according to The Washington Post.
Matthew Graves, the District’s Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, said the office is prosecuting most violent felonies and that the cases most frequently dropped are gun possession, drug possession and burglaries, according to the Post. The local police chief has said officers aren’t to blame, and that every person they arrest needs to be taken off the city’s streets.
“Of course we are concerned,” Robert J. Contee III, the Washington, D.C. police chief, told the Post. “We believe every person we arrest should be off the streets.”
“I can promise you, it’s not MPD holding the bag on this,” he said. “That’s B.S.”
As recently as 2015, the prosecutor’s office was only rejecting 35 percent of arrests that would have been tried in the Superior Court, according to the Post. At 67 percent, the D.C. office declines far more cases than comparable local or prosecutor’s offices; the prosecutor’s office in Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit is located, declined 33 percent of cases last year, while prosecutors in Philadelphia declined 4 percent and prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, declined 14 percent, according to the Post.
Graves’ office prosecuted 87.9 percent of arrests made in homicides, armed carjackings, assaults with intent to kill and first-degree sexual assault cases in 2022, he told the Post; in 2018 that figure was 95.6 percent.
The Washington, D.C. crime lab has been unaccredited since 2021, meaning prosecutors have to pay to have evidence examined at outside laboratories, and violent offenses are prioritized, according to the Post. Graves also told the outlet that police body camera footage has increased the proportion of cases prosecutors drop because they can tell earlier whether there’s sufficient evidence for a conviction.
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Laurel Duggan is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
