Andrew Manuel Crespo

An initiative cracking down on gun crimes in the District targeted three predominantly Black wards and was not enforced citywide as announced, U.S. prosecutors acknowledged in court records, drawing attacks that the policy disproportionately subjected African American defendants to lengthier prison terms. The geographic targeting of the program launched in February 2019 — under which felons caught illegally possessing guns are charged under federal statutes — was recently disclosed after a defendant challenged the program backed by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D)...The initiative’s original scope was disclosed by prosecutors in litigation with defendant John Victor Reed, who moved this March to dismiss his one-count indictment from March 2019 of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. Represented by federal defenders and Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo, Reed argues the program unlawfully nullifies the authority of local gun statues and courts, is arbitrary and capricious and retaliates against defendants who sought pretrial release in D.C. Superior Court... “It’s bad enough that D.C. is the only city in the country without any control over its local prosecutor,” Crespo said. “At a minimum, it deserves honesty and transparency from its U.S. attorney.” Crespo declined to comment on the U.S. attorney's office reported modification of the program, saying the change has not been reported to the court.

An article by Andrew Manuel Crespo: Over the past few days, millions of people have seen a now-viral video in which two federal agents dressed in full combat gear removed an apparently peaceful protester from the streets of Portland, Ore., and carried him away in an unmarked van. Stories have emerged of other people being taken or pursued by federal agents in a similar fashion. Meanwhile, troubling videos show federal agents in Portland beating a peacefully resolute U.S. Navy veteran and, on a separate occasion, shooting a man in the face with a nonlethal munition, which broke his skull. As criticism of these events rolled in—including from virtually every relevant state and local official in Oregon—the Department of Homeland Security scheduled a press conference earlier this week to try to reclaim the narrative. If the point of that press conference was to reassure an anxious nation that this unfamiliar and recently constituted federal police force is following the law, it likely achieved the opposite effect. In particular, there is a two-minute segment of the press conference that is both revealing and highly disturbing. It shows that one of the top commanders of this new paramilitary federal police force—Kris Cline, Deputy Director of the Federal Protective Service—apparently does not know what the word “arrest” means. To say as much might seem like harping on semantics or, worse, like picking on Cline for speaking inartfully. But it is absolutely critical to unpack and examine Cline’s words—because the word arrest is one of the most important words in the constitutional law of policing.Simply put, for an arrest to be constitutional it must be supported by probable cause. This means that the arresting officer must be able to point to specific facts that would cause a reasonable officer to believe that the person being arrested has committed a specific crime.

Enforcing law and order in U.S. cities, traditionally the function of local, county and state police, is a new priority of the federal government. President Donald Trump said the deployment of federal agents in Portland, Oregon, will be replicated in Chicago, Seattle and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to help combat violent crime and civil unrest. At least some state and local leaders say they don’t welcome the assistance. Isn’t policing a local issue? Generally speaking, yes -- the U.S. Constitution reserves police powers for states to exercise. The federal government’s involvement at the local level is limited to specific purposes such as combating crimes covered by federal law (examples are bank robbery, kidnapping, weapons possession and counterfeiting), protecting federal properties like courthouses and safeguarding U.S. constitutional rights...Can cities decline help or kick out federal officers? Again, not if those officers are protecting federal rights and enforcing federal crimes such as vandalizing a courthouse or post office. “Portland can’t say, ‘We don’t want you in our cities -- go home,’” said Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law School. Federal authority generally prevails under the Constitution when it conflicts with state authority, he said. More plausible legal challenges might focus on the conduct of the officers -- for instance, whether they are violating free-speech rights by discouraging demonstrations or protections against unreasonable seizures and searches. Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, unsuccessfully sought a court order to block federal agents from detaining protesters without explanation.

An article by Andrew Manuel Crespo: This past week, the Department of Homeland Security held a news conference to clear up a few things about the federal paramilitary police force grabbing protesters on the streets of Portland, Ore. If the goal was to reassure everyone that these armor-clad agents were acting lawfully, it did not go well. Instead the conference revealed, with painstaking clarity, a very big problem: The deputy director of President Trump’s new federal police force does not know what the word “arrest” means. This isn’t just semantics. In our legal system, the definition of the word “arrest” is critical because it marks an important dividing line under the Fourth Amendment. For an arrest to be legal, it must be supported by probable cause. That means the arresting officer must be able to point to specific facts that would make a reasonable person think that the person being arrested committed a specific criminal offense. By contrast, if the police have a noncoercive, consensual interaction with a civilian (sometimes called a “contact” or an “engagement” in law enforcement lingo), then the person has not been “seized” for Fourth Amendment purposes, and the police do not need to explain or justify why they approached the suspect in the first place. In other words, you can think of the word “arrest” as an on-off switch for the Fourth Amendment’s essential protections. When the police arrest someone, they are constrained by the Constitution. Before then, the Constitution’s protections are substantially weaker — if they exist at all. Given the central importance of the word “arrest” in the constitutional law of policing, it is chilling to see a commanding officer of a law enforcement agency demonstrate a basic misunderstanding of its meaning.

There’s no dispute that the federal government’s decision to dispatch officers to Portland, Ore., has exacerbated protests in the city. The Department of Homeland Security pointed to weeks of vandalism at the federal courthouse as a rationale for the deployment, but the presence of the DHS officers and their often heavy-handed tactics has resulted in an expansion of the size of the protests and the number of conflicts...Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo, on Twitter earlier this week, outlined a significant constitutional problem with the Portland detention captured on video. He pointed out that the official excuse for seizing the demonstrator was that he had been in an area where another person was pointing a laser device at officers’ eyes. But that isn’t sufficient for probable cause, Crespo noted, meaning that the arrest violated the protester’s Fourth Amendment rights. In a phone call with The Post, though, Crespo highlighted a more significant part of the incident. Instead of charging the protester with something, they simply let him go. The same thing happened to Pettibone. To a layperson, that seems like good news. But from an accountability standpoint, it's problematic. “If you push them out the back door of the station house and they never get charged, there’s not a case,” Crespo said. “They’re not going to be a defendant who can to raise the Fourth Amendment issues in a protective posture by trying to suppress any evidence.” “Which means that if there’s going to be judicial review,” he said, “it’s got to come the other way: That person has to go out and sue these agents or the department.” “It’s much harder to bring that sort of suit as a plaintiff,” he said, “than to raise these questions as a defendant. And the government gets to control who’s going to be a defendant or not by deciding who to charge or not.”

Unidentified federal officers in Portland  — and soon, in Chicago and Albuquerque —have been arresting and detaining protesters in unmarked vehicles, sometimes far away from the federal buildings they're purportedly there to protect. In one notable instance, two federal officers grabbed a man off the sidewalk and, without identifying themselves or giving a reason, put him in an unmarked van and drove off to question him. The Department of Homeland Security claims the officers' tactics here are lawful. Harvard Law professor Andrew Manuel Crespo says they are decidedly not. "The person in charge of this newly beefed-up, paramilitary federal police force doesn't know what an arrest is," he says of Federal Protective Services Deputy Director Chris Cline. "It means he doesn't know when they're violating the fourth amendment — like they unquestionably did." Listen to Professor Crespo explain why the officers' conduct is unconstitutional — and why he finds it frightening that authorities seem to think otherwise.

Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf and one of his subordinates  appear to have admitted their agents have been making unconstitutional arrests of Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland during a series of public appearances. Here’s the exact comment. “Anytime that you attack a federal facility such as a courthouse in Portland that is a federal crime,” Wolf told Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Tuesday night. “Attacking federal police officers–law enforcement officers–which they have done for 52 nights in a row is a federal crime. So, the Department, because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals and we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable.” Anticipatory arrests, of course, are prohibited under the U.S. Constitution...Harvard Law Professor Andrew Crespo summed up the constitutional issues with the Kline-Wolf approach. “I don’t know if shining a laser at someone is a federal crime,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter. The police do not have probable cause to arrest you just because you are standing near someone else who may have committed a crime.” The U.S. Supreme Court, Crespo noted, weighed in on this issue in a landmark Fourth Amendment case from 1979. In Ybarra v. Illinois, a 6-3 majority of justices concluded that a state statute allowing police to search people on the premises of a location where a valid search warrant is executed violates both the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unlawful searches and seizures as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of Due Process...Eventually, Cline said, the protester was released “because [DHS] did not have what they needed.” “Translation: They did not have probable cause,” Crespo stated.

An article by Andrew Manuel Crespo and Kristy Parker: On Wednesday, two accounts of the Department of Justice — one grounded in fact, the other in fiction — were on display in the nation’s capital. The first occurred before the House Judiciary Committee, where Andrew Zelinksy, a career prosecutor currently working at the Justice Department, took the extraordinary step of testifying about political interference in criminal cases from “the highest levels of the Department,” namely by Attorney General William Barr. Zelinsky described career officials being overridden and departmental sentencing practices violated, all to give “a break” to President Trump’s close associate Roger Stone, who has been convicted of conduct that threatened our country’s national security. At virtually the same moment, a divided three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, issued an opinion in the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Barr intervened in that case to give a break to yet another close Trump associate, by filing a highly unusual motion to dismiss the case even though Flynn had already twice pleaded guilty. Under the governing federal rules, such a dismissal requires “leave of court,” and the judge overseeing Flynn’s case, Emmet Sullivan, was preparing to hold a hearing on the government’s request. But in an unprecedented move, the Appeals Court stepped in before Sullivan had even considered the government’s motion and ordered him to grant it.

A retired federal judge appointed to oppose the Justice Department’s bid to dismiss former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI on Monday requested a hearing for oral arguments after he briefs the court. The request for a hearing sets the stage for a pitched legal and political battle triggered by Attorney General William P. Barr’s April 30 move to undo the conviction of the highest-ranking Trump adviser convicted in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation...In a 34-page friend-of-the-court brief organized by attorneys with the nonpartisan, nonprofit profit Protect Democracy and Harvard Law School professor Andrew Manuel Crespo, former prosecutors argued Supreme Court precedent gives Sullivan authority to undertake “a searching review” of Flynn’s case and to “protect the public interest in the evenhanded enforcement of our laws.” “Our democracy is safe only when the enormous power of federal law enforcement is applied equally to all citizens based on facts and the law, rather than the political whims of a particular president,” the group wrote. “President Trump and Attorney General Barr have flouted these principles by seeking to dismiss the prosecution of Michael Flynn for what appear to be partisan political reasons.”

An article by Andrew Crespo, Laura Londoño Pardo '21, Nathaniel Sobel '20, and Kristy Parker: In the wake of Attorney General William Barr’s unprecedented decision to drop the Department of Justice’s years-long prosecution of former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, many are asking: Is this the end of the case? Two recent orders issued by Judge Emmet Sullivan, the judge presiding over Flynn’s prosecution, make clear the answer is no...Given the unique circumstances of this case—including the nature of Flynn’s actions, the Justice Department’s remarkable reversal, and the facially implausible arguments the department has offered to support that reversal—Judge Sullivan’s obligation to conduct a thorough inquiry into the government’s decision is of the utmost importance. Assisted by Judge Gleeson, he should conduct an evidentiary hearing into the circumstances surrounding the government’s change of heart. And if that hearing confirms what the already available public record seems to show, Judge Sullivan should reject the government’s motion and proceed to exercise the judiciary’s core task at the end of every criminal case in which the defendant has already pleaded guilty: impose a sentence.

An article by I. Glenn Cohen, Andrew M. Crespo, and Douglas B. White: Our health care system is on the cusp of a crisis not seen before. A ventilator shortage is coming, if it’s not already here. Hospitals, physicians and nurses are likely to face a terrible choice: Should they withdraw or withhold ventilators from some patients so that others with better odds of survival might benefit from the machines? Doctors are used to discontinuing ventilator treatment if it doesn’t achieve a patient’s goals or is inconsistent with a patient’s wishes. But Covid-19 presents an altogether different issue: Denying some patients short-term ventilation, against their wishes, will probably cause them to die when they might have gone on to live long and healthy lives with the treatment. But it will also make limited numbers of ventilators available to other patients who are more likely to survive. Facing this dilemma, doctors and medical ethicists have designed model triage protocols that ration and reallocate scarce ventilators among patients, with a goal of saving the most lives. But some doctors, nurses and other health care professionals are already wondering whether following those protocols will put them at risk of being sued or even prosecuted.

Justice Elena Kagan calls it her hobbyhorse. Justice Sonia Sotomayor says it is a kind of malpractice. Criminal defense lawyers, they say, often fail to put aside ambition and vanity when their cases reach the Supreme Court. These lawyers, the justices say, should step aside and let Supreme Court specialists handle the arguments. “Case in and case out, the category of litigant who is not getting great representation at the Supreme Court are criminal defendants,” Justice Elena Kagan said at a Justice Department event in 2014...Making sure criminal defendants have consistently able lawyers at the Supreme Court would be a start. But a new article published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review by Professors Daniel Epps of Washington University in St. Louis and William Ortman of Wayne State University says more is needed...The article builds on earlier work. A 2016 article in the Minnesota Law Review by Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard, proposed a partial fix. It urged the justices to appoint expert lawyers to argue as friends of the court alongside the defendants’ own lawyers.