WASHINGTON — A search so blatantly illegal that a “high school student” would know it violated the Constitution.
That’s how a federal magistrate judge described the search of a Washington, D.C., man who was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm last week during President Donald Trump’s takeover of the city’s police force. 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.
The judge, Zia M. Faruqui, said from the bench in D.C. federal court Monday that the police had no reason to stop Riley — except for the color of his skin. Faruqui said he was dismissing the case, calling it “absolutely maddening,” and had some savage words for the way Trump has taken over local law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
“The Sixth Amendment doesn’t get thrown out the window because the government has decided to make a show of arresting people,” said Faruqui, referring to the amendment that outlines basic rights in criminal proceedings.
Trump 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.
“The Sixth Amendment doesn’t get thrown out the window because the government has decided to make a show of arresting people.”
– Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui
The show of force has outraged the city’s residents, and Faruqui’s critique helps explain why.
He said evidence from illegal searches has been suppressed in several of the cases he has overseen since Trump’s takeover. He described the mentality of the U.S. attorney’s office as “charge first, ask questions later.” And he noted that it all seemed to be for spectacle — “some big celebration” — that was “fundamentally damaging to our city.”
“Lawlessness cannot come from the government,” said Faruqui, who was himself a prosecutor for 12 years. “We’re pushing the boundaries here. We’re beyond the boundaries and something is going to have to break.”
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Riley was arrested on Aug. 18 when a pair of MPD officers spotted him walking with a satchel into the Trader Joe’s. They followed him into the store and asked to look in his bag, on the grounds his “actions were consistent with that of an individual concealing an illegal firearm,” according to the court complaint. They seized two unlicensed handguns from the bag. A lawyer for Riley, Elizabeth Mullin, said in court Monday that “a panoply” of federal agents accompanied MPD officers on the arrest.
Faruqui said it was “irrelevant” that the cops found guns because there was no justification for the search. Speaking to Riley, who sat before him in an orange jumpsuit on Monday, Faruqui said he understood that Riley was carrying the guns for his own protection, but that doing so would only get someone killed or land him in jail — fairly or not, since the police are apparently willing to disregard constitutional rights.
“The police are out there looking for everybody, and it seems they’re looking for people that look like you,” Faruqui said, one of several references he made to racial profiling. “You can’t go into a grocery store without getting stopped and illegally searched. Do you understand?”
The case against Riley was so weak that the government moved to dismiss its complaint on Monday, saying in a brief motion that doing so was “in the interests of justice.” The New York Times reported Sunday that the Riley case had become “a point of contention” inside the U.S. attorney’s office, since several prosecutors there believed the search had clearly violated the Fourth Amendment, which guards against illegal searches and seizures.
Trump and Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., have been hyping the number of arrests since the president’s takeover, which Pirro now says surpasses 1,000. But a lot of arrests have been for minor infractions, like having an open container of alcohol, or been geared toward immigration enforcement. Many immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented, have opted to stay home rather than risk a run-in with police.
Riley’s wife, Crashawna Williams, who is pregnant, said outside the courtroom Monday that Riley had missed several days of work at an auto repair shop and that she struggled to care for their three children alone while he was in jail. She was relieved to see the case being thrown out, but said he never should have been arrested in the first place.
“He was just walking into Trader Joe’s to get some food,” said Mullin, Riley’s public defender.
Faruqui apologized on behalf of the government but acknowledged the words were “meaningless.” He noted that Riley was on supervised release in Maryland and said the D.C. arrest could unfairly create trouble for him with the state.
“This is on your record forever,” he said of the arrest. “The seven days you spent in jail, nothing can undo that.”
Faruqui commended Benjamin Helfand, the prosecutor who appeared Monday seeking to drop the case. The judge said the U.S. attorney’s office badly needs prosecutors who know the difference between an illegal search and a legal one.
“If the system is going to crumble, the last line of defense will be people like you,” Faruqui said. “Once you leave, we’re totally cooked.”