That one time I sorta maybe helped cover up police misconduct
A deep dive into the shallow pool of misdemeanor criminal justice
This is something of an experimental blog post for me — more of a long form personal essay about a particular criminal justice incident I was involved with in the summer of 2015. Obviously, police misconduct and abuse is a huge issue at the moment. I’m not in a position to offer any solutions here, but I do think I have some perspective I can offer on what the problem is. Anyway. See what you think.
For a seven-month period in 2015, from about April until mid October, I worked as a misdemeanor prosecutor in Washington, DC’s Superior Court. My regular, actual job at that time was in DOJ’s Environment Division. I really liked that job (and I still miss it), but in 2015, at the age of 35, I was suffering a real sense of burnout. I figured a change of pace and a new environment would help shake things up a bit, so I volunteered for a 7-month detail to the DC U.S. Attorney’s Office to be a criminal prosecutor. It was an amazing job, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a workplace where I learned so much so quickly. It also left me really conflicted about what prosecutors do. I have a deeper appreciation for the job now, and if I’m honest, I feel a great deal of sympathy toward criminal prosecutors and the impossible circumstances they’re so often faced with. But I also know the job just isn’t for me. It’s not in my DNA the way it is for some people. And the fact that it is in some people’s DNA.. I’m not even sure that’s a good thing. It should be a really hard job that constantly tears you in several directions, and how do you even do that long term without becoming desensitized? Does that make sense?
First, some background: DC is a unique jurisdiction in the United States, in that it’s not a state. That fact has a lot of weird spin-off effects, and one of them is that DC doesn’t have its own state prosecutors (not really, anyway), and it doesn’t really have a state court system. The DC courts are all established by Congress, and DC judges are appointed by the president. And if you commit a major crime in DC, you aren’t prosecuted by “local” prosecutors. You’re instead prosecuted by DOJ attorneys who work for the DC U.S. Attorney’s Office. The DC Metropolitan Police department (MPD) is a locally-run and locally-controlled office, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office isn’t. Trials take place in DC Superior Court, which, again, is a court created by Congress, but it’s not a “federal” court in the same way that other cities have federal courts.
Anyhow, The DC U.S. Attorney’s Office is frequently over-worked and under-resourced, and they will gladly accept volunteer help from any other federal agency attorneys who wish to volunteer their time on a detail prosecuting low-level misdemeanors. I signed up to do this, not really knowing what I was getting into.
Misdemeanors Insanity, All Day, Everyday
After a short two-week training that taught me barely anything at all, I was assigned to the office’s Felony Major Crimes Division / Misdemeanor Unit. In misdemeanors, everything is a matter of triage. There are way, way more cases to prosecute than can ever be prosecuted well. First-time offenders are almost automatically pled out with community service and a chance to have their record expunged later. Prosecutors are looking for just about any reason to route the case into a diversion program of one kind or another. Prostitution case? Fare-jumping a Metro turnstile? Not worth our time — offer them community service. Defendant has a drug problem? Get them into drug court / rehab. Defendant has mental health issues? There’s a court-supervised mental health program that we can enroll him in. All of these sound like enlightened and compassionate alternatives to incarceration, and I mean — I guess they are. I’m glad they exist. But just looking at this through the eyes of the misdemeanor prosecutor — compassion isn’t really the point. It’s actually about the massive pile of 20 or 30 or 50 new cases each attorney got assigned that week and the need to clear the backlog. A case that actually goes to trial is 10 or 20 times more work than a case that pleads out at the first status hearing. Too many trials, and you’ll just burn out. Everyone does. You have to plead out what you can.
That said.. you also have to develop *some* internal sense of prioritization. Taking shortcuts with drug addicts and sympathetic mental health cases will put a small dent in the case pile, but it won’t eliminate it. There are still cases that have to be tried. And more importantly, you can’t be afraid of taking cases to trial. This is one of the lessons drilled into the newbie prosecutors early on — you’re never afraid to try the case. Even if it’s a bad case and you’ll probably lose, then fine. Just lose. It comes with the territory.1 But if word gets out among the criminal defense attorneys that you won’t actually take your cases to trial, your ability to plea bargain is handicapped. You’re seen as a pushover, your reputation as a prosecutor is toast, and now it’s the defense attorney calling the shots. So yes — trial is still a big part of the workload, and you need to develop a sense of which cases are ones where it makes sense to press toward trial.
And I mean, all this makes sense, right? There’s a huge variety of cases that fall under the umbrella of “misdemeanors,” and lots of the crimes are pretty banal. Desperate moms who shoplift baby formula aren’t really in urgent need of prosecution, usually.2 Same goes for most shoplifting cases, honestly, unless the store has perfect security camera footage and they really want you to press forward with the case.3 Violent misdemeanors, though — those are usually easy to get behind. Really nasty bar fights. Street fights where someone pulls a knife or just really beats the shit out of someone. Depending on the level of injury, these often aren’t felonies.4 But they are crimes with real victims, and if you’re going to prosecute, it makes sense to prosecute these.
The other big category of misdemeanor cases that it makes sense to prosecute are (and don’t yell at me, here — I’m just saying this is how the system works) — assaults on police officers. The thing about an APO case is.. you have ready access to your victim witness. The victim (the officer) is probably the guy (or partner to the guy) who made the arrest. The case is self-contained. Nobody involved except cops and the defendant. There’s no calling up someone who was a random bystander or a random shopkeeper and saying, “hey, I need you to come down to Superior Court next month and potentially sit around all morning while we wait for this case to get called, and then I’ll put you on the stand and make you testify under oath about what happened, and then the other side will cross examine you and call you a liar and then after all that the guy might get acquitted anyway and none of it will matter. Can I get you to come testify, or do you want me to send you an (unenforceable) subpoena and try to sound mean and scary about making you do it?” Instead of all that, with an APO case, your victim is a police officer — a guy who knows how to testify, and has done it dozens of times before. A guy who knows where the courthouse is, knows that it’s part of his job to testify in court when called, and who doesn’t mind spending the morning hanging out in the hallway with a bunch of other cops who are there to do the same thing. Most importantly, the police officer himself was hit in the face or spat on or kicked in the shin and he’s kinda pissed off about it. He’s motivated — cooperative, happy to show up, testify, and do what it takes to get the defendant convicted.
Again.. I’m not defending the system that exists here, I’m just saying this is all how I came to understand why it is the way it is. APO cases get prosecuted. Unless the defendant wants to plead out with a stiff sentencing recommendation, there's going to be a trial. Prosecutors need to keep their trial numbers up, and no one wants to plead out the APO charge anyway, lest word get out among the beat cops that you’re a prosecutor who will undermine what they say and won’t back them up when they get assaulted. Having set the stage with all this background, here’s the story of how the criminal misdemeanor case against Mr. Bledsoe landed on my desk.5
Three Days in Trial
As I said, I was working as a prosecutor in the summer of 2015. Mr. Bledsoe had actually been arrested in 2011, four years earlier, and he was charged with APO, but he was released on bail and then left the District. It turns out that Bledsoe was actually a resident of Philadelphia (or maybe he later moved to Philadelphia?) and he just didn’t care to come back to DC to do anything about his criminal charge. This happens all the time, particularly with misdemeanors. The idea that one state would extradite another for a lousy misdemeanor (even an APO) is laughable. Again — 30 new cases a week. The backlog. If the defendant is in the wind, fine. We’re moving on.
But “in the wind” doesn’t mean gone forever, and computer records are extremely good at like, not forgetting stuff. Bledsoe happened to come back into the District in the summer of 2015 (I have no idea why), and he happened to get stopped by the cops (again, no idea why). A quick drivers license check showed he had a four-year-old outstanding warrant, he was wanted for APO, and that was that. Off to jail, and this time he was held pending trial. Bail is a good system for people awaiting trial, but you don’t generally get bail if you disappeared for four years the last time you were allowed to leave pending trial.
Anyway, all that meant is that Bledsoe’s trial was going to happen (relatively) quickly. It was an APO case where the officer was extremely motivated. Bledsoe had absconded but the system had managed to find him. And now he was being held, and at the first available opportunity, we would set a trial date on his 2011 APO charge and that would be that.
The actual facts of Bledsoe’s 2011 charge were, of course, in dispute. According to the police report, Bledsoe had been subject to a traffic stop for some reason or other that I’ve forgotten. In the course of the stop he was ordered out of his vehicle, and he became combative and difficult. The officers decided they had had enough of this, and decided to take him in on some charge or other. But for whatever reason, the actual officers who had stopped Bledsoe couldn’t immediately transport him to the police station (I think maybe they were a K9 unit, and had a dog in the back of their squad car). Thus, they had to call for transport. While waiting for the transport to arrive, the officers handcuffed Bledsoe and detained him at the side of the road, standing alongside his stopped vehicle. It was at this point that Bledsoe, while handcuffed, and none-too-happy about being arrested, managed to pull down his pants and urinate on one of the officers.
I cannot overstate what a significant error in judgment this was for Mr. Bledsoe. Whatever nonsense he had previously gotten up to, whatever reason the transport vehicle had been called to take him to the precinct, none of this mattered, because there was now a new charge to contend with, that of APO/urinating.
This was the case that landed on my desk, and this is the case I thought I was trying. “Your honor, this case is about the defendant, Mr. Bledsoe, who, while handcuffed, peed on Officer Lojacono’s leg, and based on this evidence the government will ask that you convict Mr. Bledsoe of misdemeanor APO and sentence him to blah blah..”6
For a misdemeanor, there were GOBS of witnesses in this case. I had Lojacono, the young, good looking officer who had been peed on, and could absolutely be counted on to show up to trial. I had his partner, who was there and saw the whole thing. I had the two officers who showed up to do the transport, and could testify to seeing the after-the-fact evidence that Lojacono had been peed on. And I think there was even another officer pair that stopped by in their squad car and participated in some or all of the interaction. This was just a basic, run-of-the-mill traffic stop, but for whatever reason, I had hit the witness jackpot, and getting just enough of these officers to actually show up and testify should have been a piece of cake.
Maybe that was the first sign that something was wrong, too. On the day of trial, all of the officers showed up. This was a four-year-old misdemeanor involving a basic traffic stop, but suddenly I had enough witnesses to put on a trial that would last three days. I also drew a judge that, frankly, was horrible for us. Judge Wynn was notoriously pro-defendant, and wouldn’t believe a word my cops said about just about anything, but that wasn’t even the reason most prosecutors couldn’t stand her.7 She had been on the bench for 25+ years, and in that time she had slowly become completely paralyzed as a judge. She wouldn’t decide anything. She was likely to change her mind a half dozen times in the course of a routine status hearing. She would play 20 questions with both sides when everyone knew what needed to be done and we just wanted her to get on with it and call the next case. She was legendary for taking criminal defendants who had decided to plead guilty — defendants who wanted to take the plea deal and put this chapter of their life behind them! — and she would talk them out of their plea, confuse them just enough that they didn’t really know what they were pleading to, and then she’d set the case for trial. She was a menace.
Anyway, trial began, and I put on my evidence as I’ve described to you here. Mr. Bledsoe, traffic stop. Detained, handcuffed. Lojacano, peed on. Lots of cops standing around watching it. Most of the officers, frankly, told me they would never have remembered a random traffic stop from four years earlier, except that Lojacano got peed on, and it was incredibly funny and this wasn’t a thing they would soon forget.
All of this was a couple days’ worth of testimony, and Mr. Bledsoe had a very competent, well-prepared attorney from the public defender representing him, and I’m skipping over a lot of the details in her cross of my witnesses. She (the PD attorney) asked a lot of weird questions that to me, at the time, just made no sense. Then, on day 3 of the trial, she put her client on the stand (a risky move!), and it all clicked.
Mr. Bledsoe testified that yes, he lived in Philadelphia, now. He also admitted he had something like.. ten, maybe even 15 prior convictions for minor, petty offenses in DC, mostly involving drugs. He admitted that he absconded four years ago and blew off his criminal charge until he was re-arrested in 2015. And then he started to describe his version of the events that led to this APO charge.
According to Bledsoe, he never peed on Lojacono. However, he was pulled out of his vehicle by the officers, handcuffed, and then kicked and hit until he fell to the ground, and the officers proceeded to take turns (with Lojacono in the lead) repeatedly kicking his side as he was literally lying in the gutter. Bledsoe testified, in effect, that the cops had beaten the shit out of him for no reason, and that’s why he fled the jurisdiction four years ago and ducked his misdemeanor case, intending never to return.
I hate to say this, but honestly.. even though I had only been a misdemeanor prosecutor for a couple of months at this point, I was far too jaded to buy this story. I had simply heard it too many times. Yes, I figured it was entirely possible that the officers were a bit rough with Bledsoe. I am sure once he peed on one of them, they were particularly rough. But kicking him while he’s on the ground? In the middle of the street? Repeatedly? I didn’t buy it, on first pass. He was a defendant with 15 prior convictions! He had fled the jurisdiction rather than actually face his charges, and he had no contemporaneous evidence to back up these ridiculous claims. It’s not like cameras didn’t exist in 2011. He could have photographed his injuries? Or something? Judge Wynn would absolutely eat up every bit of this testimony, and there was nothing I could do about that. My chances at a conviction were probably shot at this point. But so far Bledsoe had not said anything to make me have any sympathy for him.
But then … seemingly out of nowhere — he testified that he also had a passenger in the vehicle. In fact, he said he was traveling with someone, and there was a woman who could corroborate every bit of his testimony. Suddenly, Bledsoe had my attention. The 2011 police report made no mention of a passenger. If the cops had stopped two people instead of just one person, there would be two persons identified in the incident paperwork. It was black letter, standard procedure. Bledsoe was either delusional in thinking there was a second person there, or he just figured (perhaps rightly) that Judge Wynn would believe anything he said.
At the next break, I talked to Officer Lojacono in the hallway. Was there any truth at all to this wild claim of a witness who could testify to the whole thing? Lojacono looked at me, just baffled. It was all four years ago, but .. no, he said. If there had been a witness, then the witness would be in the write-up. Bledsoe was lying. He was lying about the witness, and he was obviously lying about being beat up by the cops.
But of course, Judge Wynn would take any opportunity to drag the proceeding out further, to make it more complicated and more exhausting, so even though we were well into day 3 of a misdemeanor trial (most misdemeanor trials took 3 hours or less! Why were we still here?!) — the judge recessed the case until the next day and ordered me to “just go check” the police records to see if there was anything we could find out about this claimed witness who my officers swore up and down did not exist.
I was mad, but I was also, as I said, exhausted. I went back to my office. It was already 4:00pm, and docket call resumed at 8 a.m. the next morning, and my opportunity to “check” anything was only going to last about another 20 minutes, tops. No one at MPD would pick up the phone after 4:30. And even at that, getting them to answer a call from a misdemeanor prosecutor was all but impossible. “Hi, I’ve been ordered by Judge Wynn (I know, Judge Wynn, right?) to check with you about a routine traffic stop from four years ago, on this date, with this defendant, and officers with these badge numbers — I know it’s late, and this doesn’t matter to you at all, and it’s probably a complete waste of time, but can you run searches for me anyway? I will owe you some huge favor in the future that I can’t know just yet, but I’ll probably be exhausted and overworked then, too, but I’ll absolutely be indebted to you.” I’m sure I said something like this to the clerk at MPD headquarters, as I called at 10 minutes to 4:30. A four-year-old misdemeanor might as well not exist. What I was asking for was ridiculous. There certainly was no paper file on it anymore. The computer file would only be there if it hadn’t been automatically purged by some arbitrary IT rule.
And yet.. miraculously.. the clerk found something. First, one more tiny bit of background: All police incidents within the MPD are cataloged by a document control number (DCN). The DCN is the unique identifier for whatever happened. The police stop someone, it gets a DCN. You call 911, it gets a DCN. People get arrested multiple times, people report multiple incidents, and places are the sight of multiple events, but the DCN is always unique. The report that gets generated is tied to that unique DCN, and short of searching by some other random database field that could have god knows how many hits, the DCN is the first and best way to pull up the exact incident you want, read the report, and see what happened.
The thing is, Bledsoe’s DCN was tied to exactly one police report (as it should be). And the report listed Bledsoe as the only occupant of the vehicle. But the patient, resourceful, and mercifully still-on-the-clock-at-4:30 MPD clerk I was talking to had found a second DCN from the day/time/place in question. There was a second police report. I had no idea it existed, because it was filed under a completely different number. I would never know this second report existed, but for the clerk specifically digging for it. And that second report.. well.. it was weird. Same place/time. Same officers with the same badge numbers and everything. No mention of Bledsoe. And yet.. here was this random woman in a car who was “stopped” by police but .. apparently without having been driving the car? Her name/drivers license info were all listed, just like normal. And she wasn’t charged with anything, she was just listed as having had an interaction with the cops but like …. why was she in her own police report? It was so weird and so out-of-the-ordinary, I had an immediate sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Officer Lojacono had sworn to me that Bledsoe was by himself. I had put four officers on the stand who all said it was just Bledsoe there that night. No one mentioned a passenger witness. It was four years ago, and yeah sure I guess — maybe one or two of them forgot. But like.. Bledsoe had specifically said there was someone there! And the officers still denied it? Just 100% no way, didn’t happen?
Frankly, the whole thing stunk. Judge Wynn had sent me on what I thought was a time-wasting wild goose chase, and I hated her for it, but damnit, now I had evidence that my officers had at best carelessly testified without putting any effort into remembering the real facts of the incident, and at worst had deliberately lied about what happened and buried the fact of a second witness in the MPD database using a second secret report that they hoped would never be found. Honestly, given the weirdness with the DCN, the latter was way, way more likely. I did what any good junior prosecutor does in this situation, of course. I called my supervisor. We talked about it. We agreed it was waaay fishy. And in the grand tradition of “It’s misdemeanors, I don’t have time for shit like this,” we dropped the case against Mr. Bledsoe. I showed up in court for trial day 4, announced the government was dropping all charges, and that was that. No explanation. Bledsoe walked out. Case closed.
But like.. I know you’re probably thinking .. how is that case closed?! Surely there was a follow-up? Shouldn’t we have found this second witness and asked her what happened? We had decent evidence that some of Bledsoe’s story may have actually been true! Maybe the officers did beat the shit out of him and then cover it up by lying about who was there to see it. So surely we figured out who created the second DCN, there was an investigation, the officers were interviewed or held accountable or it was revealed that they had been lying? Or if none of that, please, surely there was at least a record made of this incident, beyond just my own memory, so that future prosecutors would know to be wary of these officers’ testimony? Obviously, the answer to all of this was no. Misdemeanors. A hundred or 200 cases a day, give or take. Prosecutors drinking from the firehose, just trying to take the next case as it comes and trying not to fuck it up. There was no follow-up. There was no nothing.
The Fallout, Such as it Was (there was no fallout)
It turns out I did run into Officer Lojacano in the halls of the courthouse a week or two after that. And I did have a conversation with him in which I explained what happened. He acted .. I dunno. Kinda dumbfounded? Confused? Whoa, that’s crazy. A second DCN? Dunno how that happened. That’s weird. But he didn’t say anything else. And he didn’t seem particularly mad or shocked that the case was dismissed after that point. He just .. let it go. Another damn misdemeanor case, it’s not like they matter anyway. DC judges, man. And, again, weirdly — from that point on, I had a uniquely reliable officer in my pocket, with Lojacano. If I needed a favor, if I had evidence that needed to be tracked down, or another cop was blowing me off and stonewalling on something for one of my cases, Lojacono was more than happy to step up. He answered my texts, and he helped out on the odd random MPD thing that I needed. I didn’t want to question it, and there was nothing I could do about it, but.. Lojac considered me one of his buddies now. And again, I was a misdemeanors guy, so it was weird. But also helpful? But also weird. I was only in misdemeanors for maybe another month or two after that point, anyway, but .. I was definitely shaken by the experience and not at all sure what to make of it.
I know it’s kinda pointless to ask, “But what actually happened at that traffic stop?” — we’ll never know. My own gut tells me the truth is somewhere in between Bledsoe’s testimony and that of the police. Of course he peed on Lojacono. It’s weird, and the officers remembered it, and it doesn’t make sense to just make that up. But the officers remembered it, so obviously they know exactly what happened afterward, in response. And I am quite confident that whatever happened was a lot more violent than just giving Bledsoe a simple little misdemeanor charge. It was bad enough that the officers covered up the fact that there was a witness. I have no idea what that witness would say if ever asked, and I mean.. the cover-up worked in that sense, I guess.
This was a really long blog post, and sort of different from my usual effort, so if you read this far, thank you. I wanted to share this story not because it was ~uniquely~ outrageous or offensive. This kind of thing happens all the time, I’m sure. It’s more that, I just wanted to convey how bureaucratic the whole police system is — and how hard it is to do anything about it. Even when there are good people who are trying to do the right thing — a public defender who took his case seriously enough to give him a real defense — prosecutors who didn’t hesitate to just walk away from the case given how fishy it was — it’s still not enough. The “good people” within the system — my supervisor telling me the right thing to do, or the MPD clerk who made the extra effort to find the buried report — are still powerless to actually change anything. And even after all that, there’s still just so much left up to random chance. A different judge other than Judge Wynn would never have asked me to go digging in the police database for evidence to backup Bledsoe’s wild story. I certainly never would have done it on my own initiative — I was already working 70+ hours a week. Before another judge, or in another jurisdiction, Bledsoe simply would have been convicted. He’s lucky he wasn’t injured more seriously. How do you fix that???8
One final note: Whatever became of Officer Lojocano, you ask? Funny enough. The trial I described here happened in 2015. But in 2017, Lojacono was accused of officer misconduct for conducting inappropriate/invasive pat-downs (basically grabbing peoples’ groins in public, on the street, in a pat down when they weren’t even under arrest). It turned into a big local news story — links here and here. There was an investigation, and .. weirdly, he actually had a history of this sort of thing. He was fired from MPD in 2019.
You might be tempted to ask, “wait, if it’s a bad case, why not just dismiss it? Why take a “bad case” to trial?” The answer is complicated. Once a case is charged, there are institutional reasons why it has to be seen through to the end. Unless there’s some profoundly moral, obvious reason why the “right thing to do” is dismiss the case, it never happens.
This happens. So, so much. It’s awful.
Going back to FN1 about cases never getting dismissed — I did once see a guy who was charged with misdemeanor theft for stealing a cup of coffee from 7-11. Which, so what, right? Except the guy had already served a 15 or 20 year jail sentence for murder, and he was still on supervised release with time hanging over his head. A conviction for the cup of coffee would have revoked his probation and sent him back to prison for years. Even that case was one we wouldn’t dismiss. But the prosecutor did intentionally coincidentally forget to tell the witnesses about the trial date, and so the case was dismissed by the court on the day of trial for lack of any witnesses. You see what I mean? It’s a ridiculous system, but it (sort of, sometimes) works.
A good example is a case I prosecuted involving a street fight that happened to be caught on video. A guy who stood on the street corner selling the homeless newspaper Street Sense got into a fight with another vendor over whose corner it was. It was a dumb, stupid fight between two homeless people, but it turned weirdly violent and caused all the patrons of a nearby fast food restaurant to run out of the restaurant for fear of what would happen. The cops were called. And the guy who started the fight was charged and convicted of misdemeanor assault. I didn’t ask for any jail time. The judge thought I was crazy, and he wanted to sentence the guy to 30 or 60 days or whatever. I mean.. watch the video. It’s bad, just from a civil unrest standpoint, but the idea that this called for jail time just didn’t make any sense to me. But people see things differently.
I can’t remember his first name, and DC’s court docket look-up tool is kinda useless, so I just have to go with Mr. Bledsoe.
Yes, just for background — Bledsoe was a black man, kinda small and hunched over, maybe 50 or 60 years old. Lojacono, the officer who was peed on, was an athletic, 6 ft white guy in his 20s or 30s. I can’t remember the race of all the officers who were involved, but it was mixed. One of them was a woman.
At that time in DC, almost all misdemeanors (including APO) were judge-tried cases, with no jury. DC is now about to change this system and move to jury trials for everything. I have mixed feelings about this. I mostly think it won’t work, and I have strong doubts that this is the pro-reform measure that the DC city council intends it to be. But that’s another blog post.
The tech bros among us will say body-worn cameras are the answer to all of this. And DC does use BWCs now as a matter of course, which is a change from 2015. But again .. I’m skeptical. Technology doesn’t change the fact that bad cops still feel empowered to act with impunity, and lie and cover-up what they need to when it’s time close ranks.
Pregunta mas estupida (stupit question): if the cops did in fact beat up Bledsoe, why were they so eager to press charges for the urination? I'd think they potentially had more to lose at that point, and they'd already gotten their pound of flesh from the perp. Or are cops just that untouchable?