The Large Discrepancies in D.C.'s Prosecution Data

Washington, D.C. is unique in how it prosecutes criminal cases. The D.C. attorney general only prosecutes a small percentage of cases largely related to juvenile offenses.

Instead, the federal government oversees prosecution of most felonies and many misdemeanors in the district through the U.S. Attorneys’ Office of the District of Columbia (USAODC).

That office has received recent attention as it has been increasingly declining to prosecute more and more of the cases it receives. A Washington City Paper story and a post from D.C. Crime Facts highlighted how two-thirds of all cases are never prosecuted.

USAODC blamed the police department for providing fewer cases that are chargeable and the loss of certification for D.C.’s forensic lab. Without the forensic lab, DNA and drug analysis has to be outsourced out of the city. With the proliferation of body-worn police cameras, defense attorneys have more evidence to dismiss a case.

But that explanation may not make sense. The trend of declining cases, largely misdemeanors, goes back to 2013, before the proliferation of body-worn cameras by police. Widespread use of body-worn cameras D.C. came in 2016. D.C.’s forensic lab lost its accreditation in 2021.

The same trend doesn’t appear for felonies. The office appears to decline the same number of felony cases each year despite the loss of the forensic lab and body-worn cameras.

The declination rate has gone up for felonies, but that is only because fewer cases are being brought to the office for review. For example, there were only 3,803 felonies reviewed in 2019—half as many as there were about 15 years prior.

In general, Washington, D.C. has seen about the same amount of property crime—the largest category of misdemeanors—over the past two decades, yet the number of those reviewed by the USAODC has been in decline since 2011.

Drop in Felony Convictions Doesn’t Appear in Annual Reports

But that is not the only discrepancy between what the USAODC has said publicly and their statistics.

According to annual reports, felony conviction rates have been between 60 to 80 percent since 2008. But those numbers clash with data released via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request provided to the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC).

The FOIA request shows snapshots of prosecution data from 2016 and 2022 for homicides and aggravated assaults—two crimes regularly prosecuted as felonies.

That data shows a distinct drop in convictions beginning around 2010—something the annual report data on felony convictions doesn’t show. In 2015 homicide and assault conviction rate collapsed to less than 30 percent; annual report data for 2015 lists the felony conviction rate at 68 percent.

In terms of total numbers, the office went from prosecuting 70 to 90 cases a year to 43, only to jump back up in 2016.

In comparison, in the middle of the pandemic in 2020 when D.C. courts were backed up, the office still managed to convict 33 homicide cases.

Prior Conviction Rate Declines

The felony conviction rate has seen sizable dips in prior years that are detailed in annual reports—2003, 2005 to 2008, but they’re not as significant as the 2010 to 2015 decline. You have to go back to 2000 to find a similarly low felony conviction rate to 2015—32.4 percent.

The 2010 to 2015 dip that appears in the FOIA data occurred during the tenure of attorney general Ronald Machen, who served from 2010 to 2015. Machen would go on to establish a unit within the prosecutor’s office to investigate cases for wrongful convictions using new DNA technology.

Machen may have also been the first to question D.C.’s forensic lab, as it paid to send 102 cases to outside labs in 2015 out of “an abundance of caution” over potential wrongful convictions.

Discrepancy in Homicides Papered

A crime is said to be “papered” if prosecution decides to pursue the case; they file the paperwork to begin prosecution.

Another discrepancy in the USAODC FOIA data is that the number of papered homicides distinctly changed between what was published in 2016 and what was published in 2022.

The 2016 FOIA data shows approximately 20 fewer homicides per year pursued by the office than the data published in 2022. The difference between 2016 data and 2022 approximately lines up with the number of case diversions each year—cases that are sent to a different court or program for enforcement.

The 2016 homicide data also diverges from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) homicide data for those years.

In theory, there should be more homicide cases “cleared”—where there is an arrest or there is enough information to proceed with a case—than there are prosecuted by the USAODC. But for multiple years the opposite was true.

Between 2015 and 2018, there were more homicides prosecuted than there were cleared—between 10 to 25 cases a year. A case can’t be prosecuted unless it’s cleared for prosecution. If anything, because not all cases go to USAODC, the number of cases prosecuted should be lower than the total number cleared for prosecution, not the other way around.

There are approximately 10 to 20 juvenile homicide cases per year in the district that should appear in the FBI data, but should not appear in USAODC data. As mentioned previously, juvenile homicide cases are regularly handled by the D.C. attorney general’s office rather than USAODC.

Investigations Without Prosecution

In 2021, prosecutors declined to file charges in a homicide case highlighted by the Washington Post—something unique for a prominent murder case that took 14 months of investigation:

But these type of issues do not routinely arise in more serious cases, such as those involving homicides, where prosecutors and detectives tend to work closely developing leads and evidence, and decisions to file charges are coordinated. Often, the arrests come only after a warrant is signed by a judge.