A former D.C. police officer was sentenced to 27 years in prison Friday for prostituting teenage girls, marking the second time he has been ordered incarcerated for recruiting minors to be sex workers.
Linwood Barnhill Jr., 59, was arrested in Mayfor crimes similar to those he had been convicted of committing a decade ago. He pleaded guilty in September to sex trafficking of a minor.
According to court documents, Barnhill recruited girls under 18 to engage in commercial sex acts and collected over $10,000 in profits from one of the teens. Barnhill also used his victims to find additional girls to be sex workers.
“This former officer trafficked children on the streets of D.C. and at a strip club in Maryland,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement Friday, after Barnhill was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Washington. “Barnhill now has 27 years to think over what he did, and we won’t have to worry about his sex trafficking again.”
In April 2024, court records show, Barnhill recruited a girl to work for him, knowing that she was 15 and in need of money because she had run away from home. He had the girl audition for him, using the stripper pole he had installed in his basement, and told her she could make money dancing at a strip club in Prince George’s County, Maryland, according to court records.
He also told her she could earn additional cash by having sex with men in private VIP rooms, the records show, and drove her to the club multiple times a week.
Later that year, prosecutors say Barnhill paid another 15-year-old girl to recruit other teenagers as sex workers. The girl invited the other minors to a house, court records show. Barnhill would pick them up and drive them to a street in the District known for prostitution. Prosecutors say Barnhill’s iCloud account included text messages with at least 10 other underaged girls discussing working at “the club” and “VIP rooms.”
Barnhill, a longtime D.C. police officer before he was arrested on pandering charges in 2013, was sentenced to seven years in prison in that case after he pleaded guilty to two counts of pandering minors for prostitution and one count involving child pornography. He was released in 2020.
He is a registered sex offender and was on supervised probation before his arrest in May in the more recent case. In both cases, authorities said, Barnhill enticed girls into prostitution, kept a portion of the money they received and often treated them abusively.
“While serving as a police officer over a decade ago, Barnhill preyed on underage girls. He took explicit photos of them and even forced one victim to work as a prostitute,” the FBI said in a statement Friday. “Upon his release from prison, he resumed trafficking minors for sex. … As today’s sentencing demonstrates, the FBI will use every tool at our disposal to put habitual child predators in prison where they belong.”
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