James Zeigler: Bowser’s partnership with feds on gun crime undermines home rule and will hurt DC
Mayor Muriel Bowser recently announced she will be partnering with federal prosecutors and law enforcement to aggressively pursue longer sentences, including harsher mandatory minimum sentences, for those charged with gun possession offenses in the District. The announcement indicates that all “felon in possession” cases — those in which anyone with a prior felony conviction, including for a non-violent offense, is caught with a gun — will be brought in federal district court, and under federal law, rather than in DC Superior Court under the DC Code. Plans also call for the Metropolitan Police Department to partner with federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency in the investigation and enforcement of federal gun laws against people in the District.
The immediate consequence of this “partnership” is that unaccountable federal agencies will increasingly carry out police operations in the District; while the people charged in these cases will be exposed to longer, mandatory sentences and won’t be eligible for the city’s rehabilitative and re-entry programs created under the DC Code.
Bowser knows that this draconian approach to the District’s illegal gun problem will provide little benefit to public safety. It will not address the complex, intergenerational trauma and institutional failures that undergird so much of the District’s gun violence. The harsher penalties will not have any meaningful deterrent effect, and the removal of judicial discretion at sentencing will undoubtedly result in countless injustices. On the District’s streets, the increased involvement of federal law enforcement will strain an already abysmal police-community relationship.
This approach has been tried before, both in the District and elsewhere, and there are now volumes of research demonstrating its ineffectiveness. Beyond that, this policy will increase the toll of incarceration on the District’s poor and marginalized families, sending more sons and young fathers to faraway prisons for longer terms; it also will make re-entry more difficult (and recidivism more likely) when they finally do come home.
Bowser’s new policy is especially galling in the context of the District’s long, and largely unsuccessful, struggle for self-determination and autonomy from the federal government. It is well-known that District residents do not have voting representation in Congress. Less well-known, especially among those who have little contact with the District’s legal system, is the extent to which unaccountable federal authorities control and influence the administration of justice for District residents.
Most crimes, and all felonies, charged in DC are prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. This office falls under the U.S. Department of Justice, with leadership appointed by the president. It is entirely unaccountable to the 700,000 District residents over whom it wields the power to investigate, charge and incarcerate. Those sentenced in felony cases are committed to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, another agency over which District residents have no control or authority. Its prisons house approximately 5,000 District residents convicted of crimes — many of whom are incarcerated in facilities across the United States, often thousands of miles from their families.
In the new partnership with federal authorities, the mayor is essentially ceding more of what little local control of our criminal system we have now. While most local crimes are charged and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the laws themselves are written and passed by the DC Council. The direct enforcement of those laws is handled primarily by the Metropolitan Police Department, a District agency. Superior Court judges, while presidential appointees, are selected through the District’s Judicial Nomination Commission, subject to provisions of the DC Code.
All three of these levers of home rule will be undermined by this new policy, which will rely upon federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and charge people under the U.S. Code (over which we have no control), in federal court where judges do not have the connections to the District that are required of Superior Court judges. Notably, too, young people charged under federal law will not be eligible for the benefits the council intended for them in passing, and recently expanding, the District’s Youth Rehabilitation Act.
The mayor’s decision to partner with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and federal law enforcement in this new policy is nothing short of a willing relinquishment of local autonomy and a decision to throw more of the District’s most vulnerable residents into what is not only an unaccountable system, but one that is often openly adversarial to the interests of District residents. This decision by our mayor, in a city whose identity has been defined by a struggle for autonomy against suffocating federal control, is one that defies any compelling explanation, political or otherwise. In that sense, this may be the criminal justice equivalent of coming out against mumbo sauce. It serves no good purpose, and will have lasting effects on the District and its residents.
James Zeigler is an indigent defense lawyer in DC Superior Court and an advisory board member for the Free Minds Book Club. He lives in Park View with his spouse. They are expecting a son in March.
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