What began as a routine arrest during President Trump’s crackdown on crime ended with nearly a week in jail.
On Aug. 20, after noticing federal agents on patrol, Treyvon Cooper, 28, exited his car parked at a gas station in Northeast Washington and headed into a nearby store, according to court papers. The agents, suspicious, searched his vehicle and found a marijuana joint still fuming, along with more cannabis in his glove box.
He was charged with a misdemeanor, unlawful possession of marijuana, but he remained behind bars for four days more than the 48 hours permitted by law before a court hearing.
Mr. Cooper’s experience underscores a repeated pattern since National Guard troops and federal agents fanned out across the streets of Washington: Some defendants have been imprisoned for far longer than they should have been, in what experts say is a violation of the law. According to court records reviewed by The New York Times, at least 11 people who were charged with federal crimes by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington have stayed in jail beyond the 48-hour maximum without an initial appearance before a judge to determine whether there exists enough evidence for criminal charges.
The pattern has raised widespread concerns among defense lawyers, former prosecutors and judges, who warn that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, led by Jeanine Pirro, is sidestepping crucial safeguards in service of Mr. Trump’s tough-on-crime messaging. Some suspects, public defenders say, have spent days in extended imprisonment, detained in jails cells that are frequently in poor condition.
“It’s hard for me to conceive of a U.S. attorney who’s so unethical that they would say, ‘Let’s slow-walk these people’ to send a message that there’s a new sheriff in town,” said Glenn Kirschner, a former prosecutor who served at the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. for more than 20 years.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of Corrections said that it had “no control or oversight over prosecutorial or judicial timelines.”
Under a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1991, people arrested without a warrant may be held no more than 48 hours before they must appear before a judge. Those initial hearings allow judges to determine whether the authorities had probable cause to bring criminal charges.
But in the nearly dozen instances reviewed by The Times, prosecutors repeatedly failed to bring defendants to their initial court appearance in time, though the precise reasons for the delays remain unclear. Such occurrences were rare before Mr. Trump’s takeover of the local police in early August, and the emerging pattern has elicited scathing rebukes from judges who oversee most initial hearings.
“These catch-and-release arrests have caused presumed-innocent people to spend days detained at the D.C. jail,” Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui wrote after the government moved to dismiss charges against one of those defendants, Edward A. Dana, who had been accused of threatening the president. “This goes against our constitutional norms.”
After Mr. Cooper stayed in a Washington jail for six days after being arrested on suspicion of illegal marijuana and gun possession, Judge Faruqui stated that the delays were unacceptable.
“The federal rules of criminal procedure mandates that the government bring a defendant without unnecessary delay,” he wrote.
The spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of Corrections, in her statement, said that suspects “typically spend no more than 24 hours” at the jail before their initial hearing, and she took pains to emphasize the role of the courts and prosecutors in ensuring defendants do not stay beyond two days. “The 48-hour timeline for presentment is overseen by the courts and prosecuting agencies,” she said.
Already, the courts are grappling with an influx of cases since National Guard troops and federal agents fanned out across the streets of Washington. After Mr. Trump announced his takeover of the Washington police, Ms. Pirro instructed prosecutors to bring the maximum possible charge against anyone arrested in the crackdown, no matter how minor the incident.
The increase in delays come as the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington suffers staffing challenges.
Ms. Pirro has publicly complained that she is short-handed by some 60 prosecutors even as the administration fired more than two dozen government lawyers who prosecuted the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Those purges prompted many others to quit, and the crackdown has led others to leave, further thinning the ranks of the office.
Mr. Kirschner, who had led a team of Washington prosecutors that brought homicide charges, said insufficient staffing could never justify blatantly ignoring the law and infringing on constitutional rights of defendants.
Prosecutors, he warned, cannot simply “let that duty go unfilled today” on the premise that they can “do it tomorrow.”
Paul Butler, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University Law Center who served as a federal prosecutor in Washington, predicted that the U.S. attorney’s office would face minimal consequences for not bringing defendants to court in time, even though he said the office disregarded the law in not abiding by the 48-hour requirement.
Judges rarely move to dismiss the cases for such violations or hold prosecutors accountable, he added. One of the few remedies for defendants, Mr. Butler said, would be to bring a lawsuit against the federal government for wrongful imprisonment.
One of the Washington jails, Central Detention Facility, where many of the 11 defendants were transported before their initial hearings at Federal District Court, suffers from maintenance issues, such as frequent flooding, sweltering heat and toilet leakages, according to a recent report filed by an internal D.C. government watchdog that inspected the jail facilities.
In at least four of the 11 cases where the defendants were left in jail beyond the two-day maximum, the charges were ultimately either downgraded or dismissed.
In one, Torez Riley was detained for three days after his arrest without a hearing. He was stopped at a Trader Joe’s for what the police said was possession of two handguns in his bag. Mr. Riley’s case had already been a point of contention inside the U.S. attorney’s office, where a number of prosecutors concluded that officers unlawfully searched Mr. Riley when they stopped him, violating the Fourth Amendment.
The government later moved to dismiss the case.
Eugene Ohm, a federal public defender for the District of Columbia who practiced for over 20 years, said that he had not seen instances where people were “held for several days in jail without seeing a judge on minor offenses.”
“The police and prosecutors don’t get to unilaterally decide who stays in jail,” he said, adding that the 48-hour rule is “the bare minimum that is acceptable under the Constitution.”
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
Minho Kim covers breaking news and climate change for The Times. He is based in Washington.
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