After D.C. police officer Brian T. Gibson was shot four times in the head and shoulder while he sat in his patrol car in 1997, his mother, Shirley Gibson, found solace in knowing that the man convicted of that murder had been given a life sentence without parole.
“I get a little comfort knowing that,” Shirley Gibson, who began honoring her son’s memory by serving turkey dinners to hundreds of D.C. police officers every year, once said before she died in 2021.
Now, the family is facing the possibility that Marthell N. Dean will be allowed to walk free under a controversial D.C. law that allows convicts who committed their crimes while under the age of 24 to obtain an early release or reduced sentence if they’ve already spent 15 years behind bars.
Dean’s petition under the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act is being opposed by Gibson’s family, federal prosecutors, D.C.’s police chief and the police labor union. Interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll said in a statement that the “vow to never forget is not a hollow one” and that the gunman “responsible for this heinous act should remain incarcerated for the rest of his life.”
The request, which could be several months away from being ruled on by a judge, has once more thrust into the spotlight the controversial law that offers a second chance to even D.C.’s most violent offenders. While advocates argue the provision recognizes rehabilitation and has a low recidivism rate, opponents say it undermines judges and juries and forces victims and their loved ones to relive the most traumatic periods of their lives.
“It’s essentially a ‘get out of jail early’ ticket for repeated, serial, cold-blooded killers,” the U.S. attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, said in an interview. “It’s inconsistent with a civil society. It spits on the face of every grieving family. This isn’t reform. This is pure evil dressed up as compassion.”
As of 2023, D.C. judges had granted early release petitions for 155 people, and officials said then that 90 percent of them had not been charged again with a crime. More recent statistics were not immediately available. Pirro said judges grant petitions to about 80 percent of those who ask.
The law, which was revised several years ago to make it easier for offenders to be released early, has earned opposition from federal prosecutors appointed by presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump. For law enforcement, “Brian’s murder was a profound wound that still echoes,” the police union chairman, Greggory Pemberton, wrote to D.C. Superior Court. “It reminded every officer of the mortal risks we face daily.”
Dean’s petition is filed under seal in D.C. Superior Court, so his arguments for why he should be granted an early release or a reduced sentence are thus far shrouded in secrecy. His attorney has not returned calls or emails seeking comment. Effort to reach Dean’s family were not successful.
Gibson was ambushed on an early February morning in his patrol car at Missouri and Georgia avenues NW, near the 4th District police station, where he was assigned. Dean shot the uniformed officer after being thrown out of a nightclub by a different, off-duty police officer, and prosecutors said he sought retribution with a .45 caliber pistol by targeting the first random officer he spotted. Police arrested Dean, still armed with the gun used against Gibson, a little more than a minute after the shooting.
Dean was convicted by a jury that at one point deadlocked on a verdict. The case was fraught. Detectives said Dean confessed, but they didn’t document his statement. And defense lawyers argued detectives lied and that evidence suggested someone else killed the officer. Two jurors told The Washington Post after the verdict that they had misgivings because the investigation had been sloppy.
Gibson, a Marine Corps reservist who served in Operation Desert Storm, was married and had two daughters, one who was 13 months old when he was killed. His superiors named him Officer of the Month eight times in 1995. Pemberton said in a statement that Gibson’s family “transformed their pain into extraordinary service to MPD and its members.”
Shirley Gibson founded the D.C. chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors, and in addition to Christmas dinners, put on Thanksgiving feasts for officers, and raised money with golf tournaments.
But, Pemberton noted, “the pain remains permanent: no more anniversaries, no father-daughter dances, no grandfather stories. Brian is gone forever because of Dean’s actions.”
The Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act that Dean is now hoping to benefit from has undergone changes since it was enacted in 2016, when an offender had to be younger than 18 at the time the crime had occurred and was required to have served at least 20 years in prison to qualify. It was later amended to raise the age of those eligible to under 25 and lower the time served to 15 years. And the statute now states that if an offender meets the criteria — numerous factors that include maturity, rehabilitation and low propensity for further violence — a judge shall grant the petition “despite the brutality or cold-blooded nature of any particular offense.”
The recidivism rate for those whose petitions were approved by a judge is about 3 percent, officials said, which advocates point to as a success. Opponents, such as Pirro, have seized on high-profile cases in which released inmates have killed or committed other violent crimes. In one such case, a person convicted in 1995 at age 16 of murdering a child during a D.C. home invasion received an early release on Aug. 7, 2020. He was convicted last year of another murder committed in 2021.
Last year, Pirro urged the D.C. Council to repeal the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, asserting it coddled young criminals. She said in the interview that 4 of every 10 killers in the District are under the age of 25, and that the law “essentially created a 15-year maximum penalty for 40 percent of the murderers in Washington D.C.”
Pirro said her office would oppose Gibson’s release, but, given the rate of success for petitioners, she called such pleas in D.C. as “almost an exercise in futility.”
Erin Pinder, the executive director of the Second Look Project, which represents people seeking release under the law, declined to comment on Dean’s petition. She referred to previous statements defending the law.
The incarceration reduction act, Pinder wrote in one statement she provided, “is working and evidence is undeniable.”
The law, she said, “gives judges the tools to evaluate rehabilitation, account for the maturity that comes with time, and ensure that individuals who no longer pose a danger to the public have a meaningful path home. This is not leniency. It is sound policy, grounded in decades of research showing that people age out of violent crime as they mature.”
Pinder said in the statement that critics who believe the law threatens public safety “misread both the law and the evidence.” She said it can take months, sometimes years, for an offender to qualify to petition the court for early release, and even then there are hurdles in the courtroom. She pointed to studies showing “long sentences have little deterrent effect on future crime.”
Members of the Gibson family did not respond to interview requests. But the police union sent reporters a letter written by Gibson’s sister, Terrica Gibson, pleading for people to send letters to the court on her brother’s behalf.
“Brian is gone forever because of Marthell Dean,” Terrica Gibson wrote, noting Dean’s attorneys refer to the shooting as “the crime.” She said in her plea that such wording “takes away from the fact that a good man was senselessly murdered. That he was first shot in the shoulder, so he had time to realize he had been hit before Dean shot him 3 times in the head and killed him. ”
The first turkey dinner Shirley Gibson held, the year her son died, drew a handful of officers from the 4th District station. By her final dinner, in December 2016, nearly two decades later, more than 400 officers paraded through her home, along with Mayor Muriel. E. Bowser (D).
Through the dinners, the mother who’d lost her son became known as D.C.’s “law enforcement’s Mom.”
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