Local
Mendelson seeks halt to controversial order signed by Fenty
By: Bill Myers
Examiner Staff Writer
January 5, 2009
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| “This new authority is broad,” Councilman Phil Mendelson said in a memo to council Chairman Vincent Gray. The council needs “a chance to look at the issue.” (Examiner File) |
In his first official act of the new year, Mendelson, D-at large and chairman of the city’s judiciary committee, has introduced emergency legislation that would suspend Mayor Adrian Fenty’s program until the council can weigh the issue.
“This new authority is broad,” Mendelson said in a memo to council Chairman Vincent Gray. The council needs “a chance to look at the issue.”
The Examiner reported last month that Fenty had given the police department the right to issue subpoenas in “any municipal matter.” City officials privately assured a wary U.S. Attorney Jeff Taylor that the subpoenas would only go out for minor matters and wouldn’t interfere with major investigations. But a day after the new authority became public, city Attorney General Peter Nickles said that police needed the subpoenas to close homicide investigations.
Law experts interviewed by The Examiner have said they knew of no police force that had been given broad subpoena authority. Such power usually is reserved for prosecutors, through the grand jury process. The constitutional framers wrote grand jury protections into American law in part because they felt British authorities had abused civil rights with so-called “writs of assistance,” which gave the king’s soldiers the right to subpoena subjects’ records and homes, experts say.
Nickles said that the authority is needed to get a handle on D.C.’s spiraling number of homicides.
Homicides have gone up for the past two years, the first consecutive increase since 1989-91, when D.C. was the nation’s “murder capital.” Last summer, Lanier threw up barricades in the stricken Trinidad neighborhood to keep strangers from entering the area.
Fenty has not spoken publicly about the new subpoenas. But Nickles has downplayed concerns that D.C. officials could bungle prosecutors’ investigations.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office has to prosecute them,” he said in an interview last month. “We have to catch them.”
