2026-04-09T09:00:55.817Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/09/politics/pirro-search-seizure-gun-defendants
特朗普政府去年夏天将国民警卫队大量部署到华盛顿特区，宣称此举能将更多危险罪犯关押在首都。但自此次部署行动展开以来，已有近十起刑事案件中，被查出携带武器并遭到联邦法院起诉的人最终无罪释放。
近几个月来，华盛顿特区联邦初审法院的法官多次认定案件存在致命缺陷，美国司法部不得不撤销非法持有枪支案件的起诉——这些缺陷主要源于枪支是在违宪的警方搜查中被发现的。
华盛顿的多名律师表示，这些败诉的枪支案件从一开始就证据不足，本就不该被提起诉讼。而这些案件——有时在历经数月的案情陈述和听证后才被驳回——暴露出美国检察官珍妮娜·皮尔罗领导下的联邦检察官办公室实力大幅缩水。
据近十二名消息人士透露，即便华盛顿的犯罪率有所下降，这些案件还是暴露了特朗普政府政策带来的不良后果。与特区法院相关的十名人士（包括前华盛顿特区联邦检察官办公室检察官和辩护律师）表示，特朗普政府在特区的政策推动了更多执法行动，导致更多证据不足的案件被起诉，并掏空了司法部内经验丰富的资深检察官团队。
这些消息人士因仍在从事与联邦检察官办公室相关的工作，要求在报道中不具名。
“这种情况本不该发生，”华盛顿特区联邦检察官办公室的一名前检察官告诉CNN，“检察官应该了解所有证据，清楚证据的获取方式。如果存在任何漏洞，他们应该心知肚明并在起诉时予以考量。”
皮尔罗拒绝回应涉及存在瑕疵警方搜查的案件是否值得起诉的问题。
“听着，犯罪率处于历史低位，”她在最近一次CNN采访中说道，“你不能批评这个办公室。”
“我们正处在执法部署大幅增加的时期，我们的重点是为特区民众带来安全，”皮尔罗在本周晚些时候通过发言人补充道，“因此，我们愿意受理那些接近定罪标准的案件以保护社区，尽管这并不意味着法官总会认同我们的观点。”
自担任联邦检察官以来，这位前纽约州法官、福克斯新闻主持人表示，她已采取措施培训特区街头执法人员开展符合宪法规定的搜查。其中包括在该市阿纳卡斯蒂亚社区向警员讲解搜查流程，使用随身执法记录仪 footage 向他们展示搜查方法，同时还为联邦调查局新兵提供培训。
联邦检察官办公室称，最近一次培训于今年3月举行，延续了该办公室多年来根据现行判例法向执法人员提供最佳实践培训的传统。
“从我所了解到的案件来看，我的重点是确保查获的证据是以合法、符合宪法的方式取得的，”皮尔罗说道。
其中一起案件今年由华盛顿特区地区法院的坦尼娅·查特坎法官审理，案件缘起于去年夏天“联邦接管”执法部署期间，大批联邦警员在城市街道巡逻。七名美国法警在东国会街包围了一名男子的车辆，原因是他违规双排停车。法官随后认定，警方当时并无合法理由搜查该车。
这起非法持有手枪案件仍在审理中，但根据法庭记录，查特坎法官已排除了此次搜查获取的包括枪支在内的所有证据。
枪支持有案件本应 straightforward：执法人员在社区巡逻时，在街上或车内拦下某人，搜查其随身物品或车辆，随后发现非法枪支。在这类案件中，枪支是最关键的证据。
但如果没有明确理由对该人员进行搜查，且该人员也未同意搜查，那么在法庭上对案件进行审理时，后续的指控可能会站不住脚。
今年8月的一起案件中，法庭记录显示，一名男子当时正在华盛顿市中心过马路，手里拿着冰淇淋。
“这名警官作证称，这是他第一次因乱穿红灯而主动拦停人员，”法官阿米特·梅塔在10月的听证会上说道。该男子告诉警官“他要去学校接儿子”，而警官“并未在该男子携带的挎包中发现任何异常”。
警方随后检查了该男子的身份证件，发现他正处于另一案件的法庭监管期内，且身上携带着少量大麻——在华盛顿特区，少量大麻是合法的。警方随后夺走了该男子的挎包，并在包内发现了一把枪支。
“没有警官作证称，持有超过2盎司个人使用量大麻的人会携带武器，”梅塔法官说道，随后排除了警方在其包内查获的所有证据，实际上终结了对该男子的指控。
在枪支证据被排除后，联邦检察官办公室于11月告知法官，他们“出于司法公正”的考虑，将撤销对该男子的指控。
多位密切关注联邦检察官办公室的消息人士表示，在去年之前，联邦法院中出现联邦检察官在压制证据动议中败诉并不得不撤销枪支案件的情况并不多见。根据美国联邦司法系统过去三年公布的案件统计数据，全国范围内联邦法院起诉的枪支持有案件中，因各种原因被撤销的比例约为5%。
此前，华盛顿特区的联邦地区法官很少在枪支案件中批准压制证据的动议。
（华盛顿特区高等法院——当地司法管辖区——的枪支案件则完全是另一回事。当地上诉法院最近推翻了全市范围内大容量弹匣禁令，这一具有影响力的裁决并未影响联邦持有枪支案件。）
皮尔罗办公室的几名前检察官表示，如今大量枪支案件被撤销，是因为皮尔罗上任后案件审查流程发生了变化。
此前，该办公室设有专门负责培训新晋检察官的主管。处理枪支案件的部门采用数据驱动的方法，评估案件是否足以提起诉讼，并与该市侦探保持长期密切的联系。但该办公室内经验丰富的检察官团队已被大幅削减，他们要么被皮尔罗的前任埃德·马丁解雇，要么自去年1月以来离职。
此外，该市执法部署增加也导致了工作量上升。
现在，法律界普遍认为皮尔罗的办公室“什么案子都接！什么案子都接”，乔治敦大学法学院教授、专注于研究联邦检察官办公室和特区法院如何处理华盛顿犯罪问题的辩护律师阿贝·史密斯说道。
“历任美国检察官都相当务实，”史密斯说，“在决定是否提起诉讼时，通常会行使一定的自由裁量权。但我看不到这种裁量权了。”
史密斯表示，在皮尔罗上任之前，那些源自存疑的警方拦截行动的案件不会被起诉。“美国检察官办公室明白，他们需要在案件初期就做出决定，因为这会耗费大量资源。”
皮尔罗自去年以来一直在纠正前几届政府时期办公室的名声——当时警方逮捕后往往选择不起诉，这促使她的检察官团队几乎对特区内每一起逮捕行动都提起公诉。
皮尔罗表示，在她亲自审查的案件中，她“确保这些案件符合宪法标准”。
该办公室目前对特区逮捕行动的不起诉率约为10%，远低于拜登政府时期的前任检察官。
皮尔罗称，去年夏天总统在特区开展的执法部署共带来了1.1万起刑事案件，包括在特区联邦法院和特区高等法院提起的案件。而且该市的暴力犯罪率有所下降。
“警方和检察官的目标是不同的，”一名前特区枪支持有案件检察官最近告诉CNN，“警方需要专注于安全。即便拦截行动存在问题，他们还是将嫌犯带离了街头，并查获了枪支。但下一步需要确定拦截行动的合法性。”
与此同时，负责联邦重大案件（包括该办公室的枪支和毒品案件）的检察官团队规模缩水至特朗普连任前的一半，前检察官和其他熟悉该办公室的人士表示，皮尔罗一直在紧急从其他联邦律师岗位招募新人和临时检察官。
司法部最近也取消了对联邦检察官办公室新入职一线检察官一年法庭工作经验的要求。
“你需要有人愿意保持克制，说‘这是个垃圾案件’，”那位前检察官说道。
枪支案件的败诉也加剧了皮尔罗办公室面临的困境。多位了解法院情况的人士告诉CNN，该办公室为数不多的检察官团队将大量时间投入到存在缺陷的案件中，同时该办公室在华盛顿特区联邦地区法院法官面前的公信力已严重受损。
“如果你花大量时间准备和提交案情摘要，就会少一个机会去起诉真正有证据支撑的案件，”前检察官们说道。
近几个月来，已有大约六名华盛顿特区联邦初审法官在判决意见中指出，皮尔罗的团队和该市执法部门在提起诉讼时做出了存疑的法律决定。
去年的一起案件中，警方非法搜查了一名男子的汽车和背包，华盛顿特区地区法院法官贝里尔·豪厄尔于8月做出裁决。检察官曾称，当大都会警察局的巡逻警员靠近一名男子时，他正站在一辆停放的汽车旁，另一名男子在街角吸食大麻。
警员表示，他在该男子的车内发现了一个装有波本威士忌的红色塑料杯和一瓶打开的波本威士忌，因此将其戴上手铐。
法官随后认定，警方当时没有合理依据，随后搜查了该男子的汽车，在车内发现了一个背包，里面装有一把被盗的上膛半自动手枪，以及一张他此前服刑的马里兰州县监狱的囚犯身份证。根据司法部去年5月的一份法庭文件，当时司法部辩称该男子在候审期间应继续被关押。
当豪厄尔要求司法部解释为何有合理理由拦停该男子时，“政府方面无话可说”，豪厄尔说道。
法官在听证会上表示，豪厄尔认定警方将该男子吸食大麻的行为“作为机会，试图为这名本无合理怀疑的被告人构建合理怀疑”。警方搜查其背包查获枪支的行为是非法的。
“合理依据需要的不仅仅是单纯的怀疑，”这位法官在参考过往判例和第四修正案关于禁止不合理搜查的保护条款后补充道。
Judges keep knocking down weak DC gun cases brought by Jeanine Pirro’s office
2026-04-09T09:00:55.817Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/09/politics/pirro-search-seizure-gun-defendants
The Trump White House touted its surge of National Guard members to Washington, DC, last summer as the way to put more dangerous perpetrators in the nation’s capital behind bars. But in nearly a dozen criminal cases since the surge began, people who were found to be carrying weapons and charged in federal court have walked free.
The Justice Department has had to drop illegal gun possession cases in recent months after judges on the federal trial-level court in DC have repeatedly found fatal flaws in the cases — largely because the guns were found during unconstitutional police searches.
Several attorneys in Washington say the failed gun possession cases should never have been brought into court because they were weak from the start, and that the cases being charged — sometimes after months of briefings and hearings before they are dismissed — capture a diminished US Attorney’s Office under US Attorney Jeanine Pirro.
Even with crime declining in Washington, the cases have exposed a problematic aftermath of Trump administration policies, nearly a dozen sources say. Those policies in DC have prompted more policing, more cases charged despite their merits, and the gutting of the experienced career attorneys pool at the Justice Department, according to 10 people connected to the courts in the district, including former DC US Attorney’s Office prosecutors and defense attorneys.
These sources declined to use their names in this story because they still have work related to the US Attorney’s Office.
“That should never happen,” a former prosecutor from the DC US Attorney’s Office told CNN. “The prosecutors should know all the evidence and know how it was obtained. If there’s any vulnerability, they should know that and take that into account.”
Pirro rejected questions of whether the cases with faulty police searches were worth charging.
“Look, crime is at a historic low,” she said in a recent interview with CNN. “You can’t criticize this office.”
“We are talking about a period during a surge when arrests increased dramatically, and our focus was on bringing safety to the people of the District,” Pirro said, though a spokesperson, later this week. “As such, we are willing to take cases that are close calls to protect the community, even though that does not mean a judge will always agree with us.”
Since she’s become US attorney, the former New York county judge and Fox News host says she’s taken steps to train law enforcement on the streets in DC to do constitutionally sound searches. That’s included lecturing officers in the city’s Anacostia neighborhood about the process and using body camera footage to show them approaches to searches, as well as training FBI recruits.
One of the trainings took place as recently as March, the US Attorney’s Office said, and continued a yearslong practice of the office providing training to law enforcement on best practices under current case law.
“With the cases brought to my attention, my focus is to make sure that the evidence seized was seized in a proper and constitutional manner,” Pirro said.
Some cases, like one before Judge Tanya Chutkan in the DC District Court this year, began with a swarm of federal officers canvassing the city’s streets as part of the “federal takeover” policing surge last summer. Seven US Marshals surrounded a man’s car on East Capitol Street because he was double-parked. They then searched the car without having a valid legal reason to, the judge found.
That illegal handgun possession case is still ongoing, but Chutkan has thrown out of court the evidence from the search, which includes the gun, according to court records.
Gun possession cases can be straightforward: A law enforcement officer patrolling a community approaches a person on the street or in a car, searches through their things or the car, then finds an illegal gun. In these cases, the gun is the most crucial piece of evidence.
But without a clear reason to search the person, and the opportunity for the person to consent to a search, later charges may be vulnerable once they are tested in court.
In one case from August, a man was crossing the street in downtown Washington, eating ice cream, according to court transcripts.
The officer “testified that this was the first time he had ever initiated a stop for jaywalking,” Judge Amit Mehta said at a hearing in October. The man told the officer “he was going to pick up his son from school,” and the officer “did not detect anything” in a satchel the man was carrying.
Police then checked the man’s ID, noticed he was under court supervision from another case, and that he was carrying bags of marijuana, which is allowed in DC in smaller amounts. The police then grabbed the satchel that the man was carrying, and found a gun inside.
“No officer testified that the possible possession of a weapon was consistent with a person possessing more than 2 ounces of marijuana for personal consumption,” Mehta said, throwing out everything police found in their search of his bags, and effectively ending the case against the man.
Following the loss of the gun as evidence, the US Attorney’s Office in November told the judge they were dismissing the case against the man, “in the interests of justice.”
A federal prosecutor losing a suppression motion and having to drop a gun case in DC was, before last year, a rarer occurrence in federal court, several sources who watch the US Attorney’s Office closely say. Nationally, the number of gun possession cases charged in federal court are dismissed — for any reason — at a rate of about 5%, according to case statistics from the past three years published by the US federal judiciary.
Federal district judges on the bench in DC had rarely granted suppression motions on gun cases before.
(Gun cases in DC Superior Court — the local jurisdiction — are a different beast entirely. The local Court of Appeals recently struck down a citywide ban on high-capacity firearm magazines, in an impactful ruling yet one that isn’t affecting the federal possession cases.)
Several former prosecutors with Pirro’s office say the raft of now-dismissed gun cases has happened because the vetting of cases has changed since Pirro took office.
Previously, the office also had supervisors who focused on training greener prosecutors. The section handling gun cases used a data-driven approach to determining whether the cases would be sound enough to charge and maintained close, long-standing contacts with detectives in the city. But the ranks of the experienced prosecutors in the office have been gutted, having been fired by Pirro’s predecessor Ed Martin or left the office since last January.
Plus, the workload has gone up with the law enforcement surge in the city.
Now, the perception among the legal community is that Pirro’s office charges, “Everything! Everything,” said Abbe Smith, a Georgetown Law professor and defense lawyer who focuses on how the US Attorney’s Office and the DC courts approach crime in Washington.
“Past US attorneys have been fairly pragmatic,” Smith said. “There’s some discretion that’s usually involved in the decision having the case go forward. I see none.”
Prior to Pirro’s tenure, cases that originated with questionable police stops would not have been charged, Smith said. “The US Attorney’s office understood they were making those decisions at the front end. It’s costly in terms of resources.”
Pirro, since last year, has been combatting a reputation of the office in previous administrations for choosing not to prosecute following arrests in the past, prompting her prosecutors to bring charges nearly every time a person is arrested in the city.
Pirro said that on the cases she’s personally reviewed, she “made sure that they meet the constitutional muster.”
The office currently has a rate of not charging, in either local or federal cases, about 10% of DC arrests, a far lesser amount than her predecessors in the Biden administration.
Pirro said the president’s law enforcement surge in DC last summer merited 11,000 criminal cases, which includes cases charged in both DC’s federal court and in DC Superior Court. And violent crime has dropped in the city.
“The goal of the police and the goal of the prosecution are different,” one former DC gun possession prosecutor told CNN recently. “The police need to be focused on safety. If the stop was bad, still they got the person off the street and they got the gun. But the next step is determining the legality of the stop.”
At the same time, a team of prosecutors working on federal major crimes, including the gun and drug cases for the office, shrunk to half of what it was before Trump retook the presidency, and Pirro has scrambled to bring in new hires and temporary prosecutors from other federal lawyer jobs, former prosecutors and others familiar with the office say.
The Justice Department also recently lifted its requirement of one year of courtroom experience for new line prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office.
“You have to have people willing to exercise restraint and say, this is a garbage case,” the former prosecutor said.
The losses in the gun cases have compounded difficulties Pirro’s office is facing as well. The thin ranks of prosecutors in the office are sinking time into flawed cases, and the office has lost significant credibility before the district judges in the DC District Court, several people close to the bench have told CNN.
“If you’re spending an inordinate amount of time briefing and preparing, it’s one less opportunity for you to bring another case that does have merit,” the former prosecutors said.
In opinion after opinion in recent months, about a half-dozen DC federal trial-level judges have captured how Pirro’s team and law enforcement in the city made iffy legal decisions in charging the cases.
In one case last year, police had gone through both a man’s car and the backpack illegally, DC District Court Judge Beryl Howell decided in August. Prosecutors had said the man was standing next to a parked car and another man smoking marijuana on a street corner in Southeast DC when patrolling Metropolitan Police officers approached him.
The officers said he had a red plastic cup of bourbon and an open bottle of bourbon in his car, leaving them to handcuff him.
Then, without having probable cause, the judge found, the police officers searched the car and found a backpack with a stolen, loaded semi-automatic pistol in it, as well as an inmate ID card from a Maryland county jail where he had previously served time, according to a court filing from the Justice Department in May last year arguing the man should stay in jail as he awaited trial.
When Howell asked the Justice Department to explain why there was reasonable suspicion to stop the man, “the government says nothing,” Howell said.
Howell determined the police took their approach of the man smoking marijuana “as an opportunity to try and build reasonable suspicion to this defendant for whom they had none,” the judge said at a hearing. The search of his backpack, where police found the gun, was unlawful, she said.
“Probable cause requires more than bare suspicion,” the judge added, looking at past cases and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.