Matthew Graves’ Abysmal Legacy as US Attorney for DC
The legacy of Matt Graves, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, is now coming into focus, and it’s not pretty.
In April, I reported in these pages that from 2018 to 2022, only 1.7% of people arrested on charges of carrying a pistol without a license in the District were sentenced to prison.
Now we have the 2023-2024 data from the District of Columbia Sentencing Commission, which shows that during the last two years of Graves’ tenure, a meager 3% of adults arrested on charges of carrying a pistol without a license were sentenced to prison.
That abysmal data point exemplifies his stint as the District’s top prosecutor and indicates the Herculean task for interim U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.
When he was sworn into office in November 2021, Graves had served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District for almost 10 years before entering private practice in 2016. You would think he would know how to be an effective prosecutor.
By October 2023, two years into the job, Graves was feeling the political heat. Crime rates had exploded on his watch. Homicides, armed carjackings, robberies, and gun crimes were all up. Bodies were piling up in the morgue, and a series of high-profile politicos were victims of violent crime.
In February of that year, Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota was viciously assaulted in the elevator of her........
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