City lawyers scrambled to recast legal justifications for Mayor Adrian Fenty’s controversial neighborhood anti-crime program within a week of throwing up police checkpoints and limiting entrance to the violence-wracked Trinidad neighborhood, internal documents obtained by The Examiner show.

On June 4, the day Fenty announced his no-go zones, Deputy Attorney General Wayne C. Witkowski wrote a memo in defense of the roadblocks. Witkowksi relied on a New York appellate decision in a 1990s case called Maxwell v. New York. There was mention of only one other possibly contradictory 2000 case from the U.S. Supreme Court.