Crime in Washington, D.C., is a crisis. Six months ago, the Washington Examiner looked at some of the problems plaguing the nation’s capital. In the months since, things feel worse than ever, but that might be starting to change. In this series, we are looking at how the nation’s capital wound up with its record on crime, how it affects its standing in the world, and what can be done to turn the problem around. In part three, the Washington Examiner looked at how one prosecutor has taken special interest in the events of Jan. 6, sometimes to the detriment of other cases.
U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves’s tough-on-crime approach to defendants involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach has continued to capture national headlines, as have violent crime rates in Washington, D.C., which soared under his watch last year.
The juxtaposition has invited criticisms of Graves, who was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve as Washington’s chief prosecutor in 2021.
Graves announced this month his office had brought charges against more than 1,300 defendants involved in the Jan. 6 riot since 2021. He has secured convictions through plea deals or jury trials for most of them. The charges have ranged from minor trespassing violations to rare seditious conspiracy felonies.
One Graves critic, Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and conservative legal analyst, said the Department of Justice “would ordinarily not charge” minor infractions like it has against hundreds of these defendants.
“As dictated by the Biden DOJ, the D.C.-USAO has pressed these cases in the service of the Democrats’ political hyperbole, which ludicrously portrays the Capitol riot as on a historic par with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor” McCarthy said.
Meanwhile, Graves’s prosecutorial efforts when it comes to local violent crime have also drawn scrutiny, but for a different reason: His declination rate, or the rate at which his office declines to prosecute suspects who have been arrested, reached a jarring level of nearly 70% in fiscal 2022.
Resource management
Homicides, guns, robberies, and carjackings were a grim theme in Washington in 2023. Homicides were higher than they had been in at least 20 years, and carjackings doubled over the previous year, city data show.
The District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s Office is unique in that it is responsible for prosecuting many of these local crimes through its Superior Court Division while also balancing bringing federal cases in the U.S. district court.
Violent crime, while improving so far in 2024, ravaged the city last year, including by way of repeat offenders, raising questions about Graves’s efforts on the superior court side to penalize criminals. Graves indicated in January that a “surge of resources,” directed to Graves’s office by Attorney General Merrick Garland, would help address the issue of violence.
A glaring question raised by Graves’s detractors is whether he should have been allocating fewer resources to tracking down and prosecuting so many nonviolent suspects who breached the Capitol in 2021 rather than sticking to those who committed violence and destruction that day.
Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney appointed by President George W. Bush, told the Washington Examiner, “It’s a complete mismanagement of resources. You have limited resources to begin with.”
Tolman has worked as a defense attorney for a few Jan. 6-related defendants and claimed he observed that federal investigators had at times taken orders to shift their priorities to Capitol riot cases.
The DOJ “took the FBI and other law enforcement all over this country away from really important crimes and violent crimes, took them off that and made this a priority, and it’s a combination of Graves and DOJ seeing this as a politically expedient moment,” Tolman said.
The U.S. attorneys’ office confirmed to the Washington Examiner that 3% of its full-time staff of federal prosecutors, known as assistant U.S. attorneys, are assigned to work on Jan. 6-related cases.
That figure does not account for prosecutors whom the U.S. attorney’s office has outsourced from other cities to prosecute those cases.
William Shipley, who has worked as a defense attorney in Capitol riot cases, said he has seen prosecutors from Boston, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and elsewhere assigned to cases. He also noted that ebbs and flows of the prosecutions since 2021 were indicative of a backlogged court system.
“You’ve got a whole FBI out all over the country arresting people, and we’ve got one little court with 15 judges, and on the district court side, they’ve got other cases to do too,” he said.
McCarthy said he felt Jan. 6 cases were hoarding precious resources that could have been dedicated to violent crime in the nation’s capital.
“For three years, this has involved diverting finite law-enforcement resources away from far more serious crime, even though that serious crime has engulfed Washington, D.C,” McCarthy said.
Declination rate
Graves declined to prosecute 67% of those arrested in superior court in fiscal 2022, the highest declination rate in at least the last 10 years. Amid pressure to answer for why two-thirds of arrests in the district resulted in no prosecution while violent crime was surging, Graves brought the declination rate down in fiscal 2023 to 56%, which is still the second-highest in at least the last decade. Graves’s office said it anticipates releasing new data in the coming days.
Graves addressed the high rate in a press conference last fall, pleading with the public to focus less on the rate and more on underlying data.
Graves presented numerous data points, chief among them the shuttering of a drug lab in 2021 that, he said, effectively neutered his office’s prosecutorial ability. He said that by the final quarter of fiscal 2023, drug testing had resumed normal operations.
He also said one in five declinations was due to objections from victims. These tend to involve domestic disputes, a result of Washington’s “strict domestic violence law.”
Other declinations occurred because of lacking evidence or prosecutorial discretion, Graves said.
“There is no public safety benefit to flooding the judicial system with cases that will ultimately be dismissed because of evidentiary or witness problems,” he said, noting that his primary focus was to improve on 2023’s “horrific” violent crime spree.
“Almost all” declinations are misdemeanors, he also said.
Zack Smith, a former federal prosecutor and senior legal fellow for the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, said the drug lab issue was a “valid concern” and that evidentiary issues are understandable — but he said the declination rate from Graves’s office exceeds what those issues would account for.
“Certainly, I think one of the frustrations from law enforcement is that there’s a sense that unless they present the case to the office wrapped in a bow, that the office is not going to move forward with it,” Smith said.
DC Crime Facts, a blog that meticulously tracks crime in the district, observed that while Graves has focused on bringing airtight cases and has partly attributed his high declination rate to that selectivity, his rate of securing convictions has remained steady. That fact undercuts Graves’s claim that his strategy has been aimed at prosecuting only the strongest cases.
The onus to improve violent crime in Washington does not rest solely on Graves, Smith cautioned.
“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” he said, pointing to controversial positions the D.C. Council has taken in previous years and how the district attorney general is the one with primary responsibility for prosecuting juvenile offenders.
Graves’s efforts on Jan. 6 cases
Graves’s office maintains thorough public details about several different prosecutorial efforts, but in the case of Jan. 6, his office also maintains a live database of prosecutions.
The U.S. attorney honored the anniversary of the riot this year in an hourlong press conference, emphasizing that his office would continue to bring cases, including trespassing cases, and that it was seeking public assistance to identify roughly 80 wanted individuals who were allegedly violent toward police officers during the breach.
He lamented the “collective harm” that occurred when a mob stormed into restricted areas of the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. He said scenes that day were “often reminiscent of a medieval battle” and noted how dozens of police officers were physically injured.
Graves was confronted in a closed-door interview last fall by the House Judiciary Committee with criticisms of his prosecutorial decisions regarding Jan. 6, according to a transcript reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
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A committee investigator asked Graves if disapproving reports “about individuals being treated more harshly because of their role in Jan. 6 than they would in a similarly situated crime” were “unfair.”
“What I can say generally is I am not aware of a similarly situated crime to Jan. 6,” Graves replied.