On December 27, 2007, a fight broke out in the common area of the Southwest 2 Housing Unit in the District of Columbia Jail in Washington. The fight started when inmate Deon Spencer was attacked by another inmate, and numerous other inmates joined the brawl. The jail staff ended the fight by releasing a chemical agent that forced the inmates back into their cells. Spencer was seriously injured, as was Sergeant Charles White, who came to Spencer’s aid and was knocked unconscious.
After the incident, neither victim could identify his attackers. Several officers who saw and responded to the fight filed incident reports that identified some of the inmates. (These men were later charged with various crimes related to the incident and pled guilty.) Video cameras in the unit also recorded the fight, but the quality of the recordings was choppy, highly pixelated, and blurry.
The day after the fight, the Department of Corrections (DOC) Office of Internal Affairs (OIA) was brought in to investigate the incident. Led by Investigator Benjamin Collins, the team set out to identify additional inmates involved in the attack, primarily through interviews and the video recordings.
As part of the investigation, Collins spoke with Officer Angelo Childs. He had not been on duty but had already viewed some of the footage. Childs told Collins that “he was very familiar with the vast majority of the inmates in the unit and that he … had named at least 11 inmates who he saw in the video that were involved in the altercation,” including inmate Carl Morton. Months later, in April 2008, Collins spoke with Sergeant Jimmy Harper, and Harper also identified Morton from the footage.
None of the officers who filed incident reports had identified Morton, who was charged on September 8, 2008, with aggravated assault and assault on a law-enforcement officer. Both charges involved Officer White.
Morton’s trial in the District of Columbia Superior Court began in early November 2009. He was represented by Lola Ziadie, and the prosecutors were Mary Dobbie and Reagan Taylor. Judge Robert Morin presided.
On October 27, 2009, the prosecution filed a pretrial motion to limit the cross–examination of Childs. In the motion, the prosecution disclosed information about a prior OIA report, also written by Collins, that investigated Childs after an April 2009 incident at the jail. The prosecution provided the court with a summary of the report to review, requesting that it be filed under seal. The prosecution told the defense and Judge Morin that the OIA report said that Childs had “violated DOC use of force policy and made false and/or misleading statements.” But the motion also disputed that second finding, stating, “[T]he conclusion that Officer Childs made a false or misleading statement is at odds with the body of the report and does not appear evident from the text of Officer Childs’s [report].”
The defense asked Judge Morin to order the prosecution to provide the OIA report and any other relevant documents, as well as to delay the trial to allow for additional investigation. He denied these requests.
Based largely on his review of the summary he was provided, Judge Morin ruled that the defense could cross-examine Childs about his false incident report and denied the defense’s request to examine the entire Collins Report.
Ziadie had filed a pretrial motion to exclude identification testimony from corrections officers who had identified Morton from the video footage but were not eyewitnesses to the fight. The motion said that Morton shared the same general physical characteristics as about 80 percent of the 156 inmates in the unit: he was Black, under 30 years old, and had shoulder length dreadlocks or braids. Coupled with the poor quality of the video footage, the similarities in appearance made it difficult to properly identify the inmates involved in the incident, the motion said. Judge Morin denied this motion.
During trial, Judge Morin asked Dobbie if she had the full OIA report after noticing that her copy of the report did not include findings of fact. Dobbie referenced her own copy of the report that she had faxed to Judge Morin and said that it comprised the entire report. That turned out to be incorrect. Due to what a later court would call a “faxing error,” Dobbie had only sent the first five pages of the 10-page report, and she had brought this incomplete version to court. (Taylor had a complete copy but did not respond to the judge’s question.)
At trial, Childs testified that he could clearly identify Morton from the video footage and multiple still images captured from the video footage of the fight. He said that he had been working in the unit for several months and that he knew Morton’s facial and physical features.
During cross–examination, the defense was only allowed to ask Childs two specific questions related to the OIA report from the April 2009 incident. The defense asked if he had submitted a false report to the Department of Corrections and if he was disciplined for filing a false report. Childs denied submitting a false report and being disciplined for doing so. Outside the presence of the jury, he told Judge Morin that he had received a “voluntary demotion,” but that he “didn’t understand it to be the result of any disciplinary action.”
Harper testified that he could identify Morton once in the recorded footage and once from a video still. Although Harper testified that he identified Morton immediately after the fight, his initial incident report from December 27, 2007, did not name Morton. His testimony was largely discounted even by prosecutors.
On November 10, 2009, the jury convicted Morton of aggravated assault and assault on a law-enforcement officer. He was sentenced to five years and two months in prison on the two convictions, to be served after the completion of his existing 15-year sentence for mayhem while armed and assault with a dangerous weapon.
On November 19, 2009, Morton moved for a judgment of acquittal or a new trial based on his inability to “meaningfully” cross-examine Childs, which his attorney said violated his Sixth Amendment rights to confront a witness. In February 2010, Judge Morin ordered the prosecution to disclose the full OIA report.
The report said that Childs was involved in a contraband search at the jail in April 2009. The first section of the report, the part faxed to Judge Morin, said that during the search, inmate Ernest Heath was restrained, arms behind his back, when Childs sprayed him with mace.
Childs submitted a disciplinary report charging Heath with “Assault Without Serious Injury and Lack of Cooperation,” after the incident. Childs then prepared an incident report defending his use of force, with no mention of Heath having been restrained. Childs’s supervisor, who was present at the time of the search, noticed the discrepancy in the incident report. Childs was subsequently reprimanded and issued a “Letter of Direction” for violating DOC’s use-of-force policies. He was also demoted from Lieutenant to Sergeant, effective September 13, 2009.
The full OIA report contained three sections: a “Background” section, with the facts of the case; an “Investigation” section, with details of the video footage and other officers accounts,” and a “Findings” section, which outlined Childs’s misconduct.
As a later court would note, “In sum, the Collins Report concluded that Childs had violated DOC’s use-of-force policy, had been reprimanded for doing so, had filed a false or misleading incident report, and had filed a false disciplinary report accusing Heath of an assault he did not commit.” Only the first two conclusions, the use of force violation and the reprimand, were formal “Findings.”
Morton then amended his motion to include a claim that the prosecution had committed a so-called Brady violation, based on its failure to disclose material exculpatory evidence.
Judge Morin denied the motion and affirmed Morton’s conviction, ruling that there was no “finding of untru[th] telling against Officer Childs.”
On September 18, 2012, Morton appealed to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. The appeal said, in part: “Despite close questioning of the prosecutors by the trial court to determine whether the entire report was produced in camera and ex parte, as had been represented, the government got it wrong, and indeed, only an immaterial portion of the report was produced. As a result, the trial court ruled erroneously that defense cross-examination on this issue should be very strictly limited and the report itself could not be used or even viewed by the defense. This permitted the witness to testify inaccurately before the jury, and prevent Appellant from effectively challenging the witness’s credibility.”
On July 3, 2014, the appellate court granted Morton a new trial based on the government’s failure to disclose the full contents of the 2009 OIA report.
“Based on the record before us,” the ruling said, “whether the government had an obligation to accurately and completely disclose the contents of the OIA Final Report and the DOC’s consequent decision to demote Officer Childs should not have been a hard call for the government. And had the defense been able to impeach Officer Childs with the DOC’s determination of his prior false reporting and consequent demotion, there is at least a reasonable probability that the jury would have weighed Officer Childs’s testimony and the government’s case differently.
On November 24, 2014, Judge Morin granted the state’s motion to dismiss the charges against Morton. Morton remained in prison for his prior convictions.
Following Morton’s exoneration, two disciplinary investigations were opened into the actions of the prosecutors at Morton’s trial. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, headed by John Ragsdale—one of Dobbie and Reagan Taylor’s supervisors during Morton’s trial—opened the first investigation; its findings were not made public.
The District of Columbia’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel opened a second investigation in early 2016. On January 13, 2021, the office filed a disciplinary petition with the Board on Professional Responsibility against Dobbie and Taylor, alleging misconduct in their handling of the OIA report. The Board unanimously recommended six-month license suspensions for Dobbie and Taylor.
Dobbie and Taylor appealed the decision to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. On December 7, 2023, a three-judge panel on the appellate court reduced their sanctions to one year on probation. The court said that the incomplete distribution of the OIA report was due to an “unintentional error.”
The majority opinion said that the prosecutors did not “intentionally” violate their disclosure obligations and that the violations happened “due in large part to the collective action and inaction of members of their office.”
The ruling said that Dobbie testified at an evidentiary hearing that she “did not think that the government had an obligation to disclose the fact that Childs had submitted a false disciplinary report.” Dobbie also said that she knew that Childs’s demotion should have been disclosed but that she had “forgotten about this fact.”
According to the court, Taylor said that she understood that Childs’s demotion and the OIA Report’s conclusion regarding his false disciplinary report were Brady evidence, but she did not explain why these facts were omitted from the prosecution’s filings. The Justice Department submitted a brief stating that any sanctions against Dobbie and Taylor were “unwarranted.”
In his dissent, Judge Joshua Deahl said he didn’t buy the response of Dobbie and Taylor that their actions were merely an “unconscious failure to disclose.”
He wrote: “Imagine if you had a dog who required a daily medication to stave off a life-threatening malady. If you were boarding that dog for a few weeks, might you ‘unconsciously fail’ to alert the kennel of that essential medication? Is it conceivable that you might omit that fact when writing a summary of the dog’s required medications, while instead highlighting a more trivial medication for a mild rash? Would you send the details of those required prescriptions via fax and then not double check to make sure that the fax went through? If you then received a call from the kennel informing you that it seemed to be missing some of your dog’s medical information, is there a universe in which you might glibly brush them aside and assure them that they had everything? It is unlikely that you would fail at any of those steps; it is inconceivable that you would fail at each of them unless you wanted your dog dead or were indifferent to that possibility. That is because people generally do not unconsciously and repeatedly fail to relay critical information provided they attach any gravity to it. And in this case we are not talking about a dog, but human beings. When these prosecutors repeatedly failed to provide them with information vital to their defense, it can only be because they attached little gravity to the defendants’ constitutional rights and liberty interests.”
– Naiya Edwards, Sarah Higby, Izabella Macedo, Andrew Sa, and Daniela Suarez
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