REPORT: Less than 40% of MPD's arrests for illegal guns result in a conviction

Last week the DC Sentencing Commission released their Annual Report, which is one of our only data sources for what happens to cases after police make an arrest. 

Without this data we would never know that 79% of adults arrested with illegal guns in DC get away without any felony conviction. More than 2,000 gun cases over the last two years were either never prosecuted, dropped or pled down to lesser charges without any public scrutiny of DC’s prosecutor.

 This report (and similar excellent analyses by the Commission’s staff) are crucial for understanding how prosecutors and judges apply the laws on the books and getting beyond the vibes-based spin that dominates DC crime discourse. The report especially highlights the gap between how the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) acts in court vs. their poll-tested “tough on crime” public rhetoric. With kids as young as 3 years old being killed in shootings, we desperately need some accountability for our unelected prosecutor who has undermined all of DC’s local efforts to reduce gun violence.

The DC Sentencing Commission Annual Report is 71 pages long (plus appendices) and represents an enormous amount of work by the commission’s staff. This blog has cited their prior work in numerous posts and they deserve a lot of credit for their efforts to educate the public and “demystify the criminal justice system for the broader community.” The commission only has data for adult arrests, prosecutions and sentencing so unfortunately we don’t have similar transparency into juvenile prosecutions by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG). However, since the vast majority (90%) of homicide suspects are adults this dataset is incredibly comprehensive for understanding DC’s gun violence problem. Here are the key points about prosecutions and sentencing overall before we dive into some of the specific problems with how the USAO handles gun cases:

• Prosecutors pressed charges in or “papered” 66% of adult felony arrests in 2023; “a 12% increase from the papering rate observed in 2022, and the first increase in papering rates observed between 2018 and 2023”
  • 2023 is the year that the USAO finally came under public pressure to increase prosecution rates after years of decline and the data confirms that the pressure worked
• Despite the increase in new prosecutions, felony convictions actually fell with “a 3% reduction in counts and approximately a 12% reduction in both cases and individuals sentenced.”
• “Ninety-two percent (92%) of felony cases in 2023 were resolved through a plea agreement” which means that the prosecutors agreed to the (often reduced) charges being sentenced
• “98.6% of all felony counts sentenced were Compliant” with the voluntary sentencing guidelines put forth by the commission. The guidelines process is very important because judges overwhelmingly follow them.
  • Anecdotally DC judges tend to impose sentences on the lower end of what is allowed by the sentencing guidelines but they rarely go outside of the guidelines. In most of the cases where a suspect gets a “scandalously light sentence” it’s because their plea bargain actually convicts them of a lesser offense where lighter sentences are allowed under the sentencing guidelines.
• In 2023 “Superior Court Judges increased the percentage of prison sentences imposed for non-Drug felony offenses. Approximately 70% of felony counts received a prison sentence.”
  • When prosecutors secure a non-Drug felony conviction the vast majority of defendants are sentenced to a prison term; which is what the USAO claims they want in order to “incapacitate” offenders from committing more crimes. But because so many cases that begin as arrests for felony conduct are dropped or pled down to non-felony offenses by the USAO fewer cases actually get these prison sentences.

While United States Attorney (USA) Matthew Graves likes to brag to the media that his office won convictions with “thousands of years” of prison sentences, in 2023 they actually secured 36% fewer felony counts than the 2014-2018 average. Even more concerning, this drop in felony convictions occurred when the courts were working through the COVID-era case backlog; which if anything would artificially boost the volume of convictions:

One factor reducing the impact of the USAO’s violent crime convictions is that a huge share of the convictions are for plea bargained down to the lesser “Attempted” versions of these offenses that carry shorter sentences. Also, for all of the “discourse” about DC’s carjacking statutes there “were only seven adult carjacking counts sentenced in 2023.” The VAST majority of adult carjacking cases are pled down to some lesser offense like unarmed robbery, despite 77% of carjackings involving guns

While the decrease in “Weapon, Property, Other” felony convictions was relatively small this is entirely because the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has dramatically ramped up gun possession arrests as illegal guns have flooded into DC. The USAO has undermined this MPD effort by securing 39% fewer felony convictions per gun possession arrest because they are declining, dropping or pleading down more cases than just a few years ago:

In 2023 the prosecution “filter” for gun possession cases looked like this:

• The USAO outright declined to prosecute 33% of arrests for felony gun possession
• 37% of the initially-charged cased were later dropped without a conviction
• 50% of the convictions the USAO did win were for misdemeanors only; up from 41% in 2022 and just 29% in 2018. Again, since 92% of cases are resolved by plea bargains, reducing the charges from a felony to a misdemeanor is very much an outcome the USAO is signing off on; not one “imposed” by DC judges.
• Cumulatively this “filter” means that only 21% of adults arrested with an illegal gun in DC end up with a felony conviction.
• While every prosecutor has some kind of filter like this (i.e. no one charges and wins every case), in DC it has gotten much worse at the stages where the USAO has the greatest level of discretion but less transparency: the initial charging stage and at plea bargaining. Looking specifically at cases for Carrying a Pistol Without a License (CPWL), which are 75% of the arrests for gun possession, we see the USAO is securing less than half as many felony convictions per arrest as they did in 2018:
  In 2018 the USAO prosecuted 85% of CPWL cases while in 2023 they only charged 68%. This was at least up from a record-low 53% prosecution rate in 2022.
  While the USAO has claimed that adverse rulings by the DC Court of Appeals are the reason they can’t prosecute many gun cases, the fact that they were able to increase their CPWL prosecution rate by 15% in a single year without overturning those rulings suggests those rulings were more of a convenient excuse. It’s also telling that the USAO has so far not tried to appeal those rulings that they say are out of step with Supreme Court precedent.
  In 2023 the USAO secured a conviction in 64% of resolved cases, just 4% higher than the 60% conviction rate in 2018. The USAO declining a huge share of cases up front has barely increased their conviction rate, despite the USAO’s spin that they are primarily declining to prosecute non-viable cases.
  In 2018 71% of CPWL convictions were for the actual felony charge but in 2023 this fell to only 40%. 60% of the 2023 convictions were for lesser misdemeanor charges (again, almost entirely due to plea bargains offered by the USAO). This is strong evidence that the USAO has become much more willing to offer and accept misdemeanor-only plea bargains for felony gun possession.
  Defense lawyers call a misdemeanor plea bargain for CPWL a “golden ticket” because they are so generous but are now 60% of the USAO’s convictions. Under USA Graves, the USAO has doled out these “golden tickets” to gun suspects at unprecedented levels.

The cases where individuals get misdemeanors for carrying de facto machine guns (often pistols with a ”conversion switch” that makes it fully automatic) are especially egregious because the USAO could simply prosecute these individuals under Federal firearms laws in District Court (as opposed to charging them under local DC laws in DC Superior Court). The already-existing Federal laws against machine guns (which apply to “conversion switches”) carry severe penalties (up to 10 years for mere possession) and gun cases tend to be more successful in District Court. The USAO could choose at any time to announce that anyone caught with these machine guns will be prosecuted in District Court and highlight the severe penalties that entails. This would be the kind of “sending a message” that might actually have a deterrent effect on criminals; unlike some of DC’s other more performative efforts to “send a message” about crime. The fact that every day the USAO chooses NOT to do this is a sign that they are “rationing” District Court slots for their their other priorities. One should read Chief Smith’s testimony saying “One factor driving the higher lethality of shootings is the increase in the use of conversion switches” as well as listen to the audio from the fully automatic shootout near Dunbar High School and consider that the USAO thinks carrying that kind of weapon is mere misdemeanor conduct.If we compare the USAO’s gun possession prosecution outcomes to the Manhattan District Attorney (DA) we see that the USAO both declines to prosecute a much higher share of cases AND is more willing to let suspects plead down to misdemeanors. Notably the Manhattan data looks very similar to the DC data from 2018 before the USAO’s performance eroded: 

There are also clear disparities in how the USAO treats illegal gun possession in different parts of DC. In 2023 the highest prosecution rates (73%-75%) were in DC’s wealthiest neighborhoods in wards 2 and 3. However in much poorer Ward 7 the USAO only prosecuted 59% of gun cases. There isn’t a perfect correlation between wealth and prosecution rates however as Ward 8 had a 70% 

prosecution rate, though that still represents over 100 people arrested with illegal guns and not prosecuted at all:

The relative lack of coverage for prosecution outcomes has helped cover up the USAO’s failures for years. Shootings, arrests and sentencings are fundamentally a lot easier for journalists to cover than trying to explain to the public what isn’t happening that should be happening. There’s almost never a press conference when the USAO declines, drops or pleads down a case. But Washingtonians are smart enough to know that a lack of prosecution leads to more crime.