Lawyers and law enforcement experts have been warning about the potential for overreach since the federal government muscled its way into policing decisions in the nation's capital nearly three weeks ago. See full NPR article.
Inside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., on Monday, those tensions broke into open court.
A federal judge, who spent about a dozen years as a prosecutor, dismissed a weapons case against a man held in the D.C. jail for a week — concluding he was subject to an unlawful search.
The man, Torez Riley, who is Black, was headed into a Trader Joe’s grocery store when local cops stopped him to look through his bag, backed by a group of federal law enforcement agents. They seized two unlicensed handguns from the bag.
"It is without a doubt the most illegal search I’ve ever seen in my life," the judge said from the bench. "I'm absolutely flabbergasted at what has happened. A high school student would know this was an illegal search." The judge said Torez Riley appeared to have been singled out because he is a Black man who carried a backpack that looked heavy.
The case against Riley was so weak that the government moved to dismiss its case on Monday. The court, in dismissing the case, called the whole thing “absolutely maddening.” “The Sixth Amendment doesn’t get thrown out the window because the government has decided to make a show of arresting people.”
Riley spent seven days in jail before the case was dismissed.
The president declared a crime emergency in D.C. on Aug. 11 and asserted control over the city’s Metropolitan Police Department, despite violent crime in the district recently hitting a 30-year low. Since then, agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the FBI and other federal agencies have been teaming up with local police to make arrests and, in many cases, detain immigrants for deportation.
“Lawlessness cannot come from the government,” the court said.