Federal judge orders prosecutors to detail D.C. police evidence problems
/A federal judge in the District ordered prosecutors on Thursday to turn over more information to defense lawyers about a recently disclosed D.C. police computer problem that may have caused information to be withheld from attorneys in thousands of criminal cases.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan set a March 27 deadline for the U.S. Attorney’s Office to report on “the government’s understanding of the extent” to which the problem could affect any of about two dozen federal criminal cases pending before him and filed since 2011. Prosecutors were also told to explain decisions to disclose or not to disclose any piece of information that is found to have been withheld.
The orders apparently are the first by a judge of the U.S. District Court or D.C. Superior Court that address the issue. Federal prosecutors and D.C. police routinely appear before these courts.
Sullivan, a 1994 Clinton appointee to the District Court, did not elaborate on his reasoning in his orders, but he has led efforts in the D.C. federal court and the federal judiciary nationwide to ensure that prosecutors meet their constitutional obligation to turn over potentially helpful information to defendants.
In recent months, Sullivan similarly prodded prosecutors to detail the impact of the discovery that an FBI agent, Matthew Lowry, working on a Washington narcotics task force allegedly had stolen heroin from evidence bags, forcing the dismissal of cases against 28 defendants.
Cases covered under Sullivan’s new orders include some previously flagged by prosecutors because of Lowry’s involvement, including a 33-defendant alleged drug conspiracy.
Since 2009, Sullivan — who presided over the Justice Department’s botched prosecution of former Alaska senator Ted Stevens (R), in which attorneys from Justice’s Public Integrity Section concealed evidence — has pressed unsuccessfully for judicial rule changes that would require prosecutors to turn over all information favorable to defendants, not just what they decide at their discretion to be relevant.
Bill Miller, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’ s Office, said, “We are reviewing the orders and have no further comment at this time.”
The court’s action came after U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. on Monday wrote to the heads of the Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association and the D.C. Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, as well as of the federal and local public defender services of the District, explaining that his office had recently been notified that some information recorded by D.C. police during criminal investigations was inadvertently omitted from final police reports.
Those reports, which may include witness accounts or evidence forms, are given to defense attorneys.
Prosecutors indicated that they had uncovered “a significant issue . . . regarding the preservation of police reports in the data management system presently maintained by the Metropolitan Police Department.”
The letter added that in “all cases, at whatever stage, all necessary disclosures will be made, and where a nondisclosure in a past case was sufficiently material, the USAO will review the disposition of that case.”
D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine has announced that his office will examine all its cases closed since Jan. 1, 2012, for problems related to the D.C. police computer program, called I/Leads, which has been in use since September 2012.After a police officer in one case insisted that he had included certain details that went undisclosed, Racine’s office discovered that some information filled out by police failed to download into final versions.
