Ed Martin's new federal gun charge plan has 18 cases. All are Black men.
The five men, who were convicted felons before their most recent encounters with law enforcement, face federal firearms charges, swept up in interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin's 'Make D.C. Safe Again' initiative pledging to get guns off the city's streets. Martin boasted recently on social media and in a community meeting that his office had charged 18 felons with federal gun possession crimes in the month since he announced his plans, more than double the number charged in the same month a year ago.
All 18 are Black men, The Washington Post confirmed through court records and charging documents, fueling criticism by some District residents and defense attorneys that Martin's plans are putting the city back on a path of targeting racial minorities even as D.C. is experiencing a sharp decline in violent crime. D.C.'s federal court sentenced an average of four people a month for firearms charges in the nine years ending with 2023, the latest data available from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Of those, 93 percent were Black.
None of the 18 — whose arrests occurred across the city — were charged with violent crimes alongside the recent gun charges. A similar initiative launched in 2020 was revealed to have targeted Black neighborhoods. At a recent community meeting where Martin pitched his plan to more than 200 people in Southeast Washington, he was met with jeers and sharp questions.
The plan focuses on felons, who aren't allowed to carry guns in the city. Martin says there's a link between violent crime and illegal gun possession, so he's ordering prosecutors to make every felony gun possession case a federal one. Moving the cases from superior court to federal court brings the prospect of longer prison sentences, which Martin says will keep criminals off the streets. The shift to federal court would also prevent people 24 and younger from qualifying for the District's Youth Rehabilitation Act, which results in a lighter sentence and potentially having the case sealed after they're released.
'Our kids in this city deserve to be safe. Our neighborhoods and families deserve to be safe and our laws deserve to be prosecuted. We needed to do better at that,' Martin told the audience.
Reducing crime is a goal everyone shares, said Ron Moten, longtime Ward 8 community activist and founder of the Go-Go Museum, but not in a way that targets only one group of people. Moten recalled the war on drugs that resulted in mass incarceration of Black men in the 1980s and '90s, including him.
'Will your gun crackdown turn into the same thing in our community? Will this war on guns result in locking up countless Black men, women and children for nonviolent crimes? Mass incarceration destroyed our community,' Moten said as other audience members shouted 'amen.'
Martin did not respond to their concerns.
Attorney Heather Shaner has defended clients in the District since 1979. She said some people in D.C. carry guns for protection because they live in violent neighborhoods, or because they have been shot before. 'But the guns don't protect them. They just get them locked up,' Shaner said.
Shaner said the aggressive arrest and prosecution policy can result in unlawful arrests. 'I'm just so sick of seeing these young men being stopped and a gun is found in the car with each of these kids and yet the cops had no reason to go into the car,' she says. 'Or an officer thinks he sees a bulge and stops and frisk them and finds a gun. They're driving while Black or walking while Black.'
Lamont Mitchell, chairman of the Anacostia Coordinating Council, which hosted the meeting in Anacostia, the city's largest and predominantly African American neighborhood, urged Martin to focus on how the guns were being brought into the city and focus on the suppliers, as opposed to individuals possessing guns.
'We have a plethora of gun violence in this city and in our community, yes,' Mitchell said. 'But what are you planning to do to intervene with these gun shipments?'
Martin said his office was working with other federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to identify firearms being transported from southern Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia into Washington. 'That is a priority. We now have new leadership in these agencies and they can help us go up the chain and try to cut the supply.' Martin's office has not announced any arrests or charges against alleged suppliers.
Attorneys say another reason Martin moved gun possession to federal court was to keep defendants locked up while they await trial. In federal court, prosecutors can request an emergency hearing with Chief Judge James E. Boasberg if another judge orders a defendant released from custody.
Boasberg has been the subject of Trump's ire since he temporarily blocked the administration, in a separate case, from deporting Venezuelan migrants without due process under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. After that ruling, Trump railed against Boasberg on social media, calling him a 'Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator' who should be impeached. And late last month Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to preserve the records of a Signal group chat about sensitive military operations in Yemen.
On Tuesday, Martin's federal prosecutors and attorneys for Monte Tyree Johnson sparred in Boasberg's second-floor courtroom over whether Johnson could be released pending trial on weapons offenses.
Johnson, 29, who was convicted in 2021 of voluntary manslaughter in the 2016 shooting of a transgender woman during a robbery, was taken into custody March 18. Authorities said they went to pick him up on an alleged probation violation and found a Glock 27 and 22 rounds of ammunition in his backpack. Soon after, Magistrate Judge Matthew J. Sharbaugh ordered him released from jail, and Martin's office sought Boasberg's intervention.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany Wynn argued Johnson was a danger to the community and should remain in jail until trial. 'He has a propensity to use firearms,' Wynn told Boasberg, reminding him of his conviction in the killing of Deeniquia 'Dee Dee' Dodds.
Boasberg — a former federal prosecutor — agreed and ordered Johnson to remain in D.C. jail until trial. 'I don't find any restrictions that could guarantee the safety of the community,' he said.
Martin's critics question his decisions to shake up his office in a way that could make carrying out his gun initiative more difficult.
At the meeting last month in Southeast Washington, Martin — a longtime defense attorney who never worked as a prosecutor — told the audience he 'needed more prosecutors' in his office, the nation's largest U.S. attorney's office, to focus on violent crime in the city.
D.C. Shadow Sen. Ankit Jain (D) reminded Martin that in February, he oversaw the demotion of seven senior prosecutors who worked on the Jan. 6 Capitol seditious conspiracy and riot cases. Jain said Martin's actions 'created chaos' in the U.S. attorney's office and asked how the moves would help him in prosecuting violent criminals in the city.
The top criminal prosecutor in Martin's office resigned in February after refusing an order from Martin she said wasn't backed up by evidence. And Martin reassigned senior prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases to misdemeanors or early case assessment screening in D.C. Superior Court, positions often held by early career federal prosecutors.
The reassignments, Martin said, were the 'best use of our resources' and added 'we had focuses in our office that I think were misplaced.'
But he didn't explain how the moves would help him with his goal of charging more gun possession cases.
On March 19, Rickey Corey Watkins, Jr. was arrested after police say he was driving an all-terrain Suzuki around 8:30 p.m. inside the gated area of the Harrison Recreation Center in the 1300 block of V Street in Northwest Washington. Police say when they tried to pull Watkins over, he tossed what they said was a Glock 19X pistol and loading magazine. Watkins, 33, had been convicted in 2013 of assault with intent to kill while armed.
Watkins's attorney, Eugene Ohm of the Federal Public Defender Service, declined to comment on his client's case. But he said in recent weeks that he has seen an increase in similar cases in which he believed prosecutors used an initial stop for a minor offense to charge a more serious crime, such as felon in possession of a firearm.
'There are many aggressive police tactics that they know cross the line. They are hoping the judges in federal court will let them get away with things that D.C. Courts have already found unconstitutional,' Ohm said.
Thompkins and Watkins were among the recent federal gun charge cases touted by Martin's office.
Tom Lynch, a D.C. police spokesman, said officers 'will continue our efforts of removing illegal firearms from our communities and leave the decision on how to prosecute each case to the prosecutors.'
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