Attorney Charles Murdter’s role in D.C. Superior Court is narrow: Get his temporary clients through the day, and, hopefully for them, out of the front door of the courthouse instead of back to a jail cell.
Or, as he tells them in a speech he’s perfected over time: “My job is to get you the hell out of here.”
It’s a speech he has been giving a lot more lately.
Murdter, part of a rotating panel of lawyers appointed to represent people for their initial court appearances, has watched D.C.’s criminal justice system balloon over the past year. A surge of federal law enforcement ordered by President Donald Trump last August, combined with a shift in posture by the city’s Trump-appointed criminal prosecutor, is continuing to flood the courthouse with defendants.
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D.C. police stops last year increased by 13% after Trump’s Aug. 11, 2025, order declaring a crime emergency in the District, according to stop data released by D.C. police. The D.C. jail’s population has soared. Crime, which was already falling steeply before Trump intervened, has remained at historic lows, though assaults with dangerous weapons are up compared to last year, according to D.C. police data. And the days in courtroom C-10 have gotten longer; in June, the court started moving the start time for initial appearances up two-and-a-half hours, to 11 a.m., because court staff had been staying past midnight too often to handle the crush of cases.
On no day is that increase felt more than on Mondays, when everyone locked up over the weekend gets brought into courtroom C-10. Before August of last year, a typical Monday saw 60 to 80 lockups, frequent court observers say. But now, that number is routinely over 100. Sometimes 120. Sometimes 130.
“C-10 is a huge time-suck,” said Murdter.
The proceedings of Monday, Aug. 3, began with U.S. Marshals marching a parade of shackled men and women from jail cells to C-10, which is located in the basement of D.C. Superior Court. They were there to make their initial appearance before a judge, learn who their lawyer is, and find out whether they would be locked up or set free until their next court hearing.
As is typical of any day in court, the cases offered a snapshot of enduring societal challenges: violence, addiction, mental illness, poverty. A man arrested for acting erratically with a pocket knife outside the McPherson Square Metro station told an attorney that he didn’t have a cellphone, a case worker or any way to call his lawyer after he left the courthouse. Another was arrested on a domestic violence charge, then ordered to stay away from the woman he had married just two days earlier. A young person was released with a warning from the judge: “Don’t hit your mother again.”
But the 113 cases reviewed in court on Monday also elucidated a newer phenomenon: a local criminal justice system transformed by Trump and his appointees.
One of Murdter’s first cases of the day involved arrests made by a U.S. Park Police officer assigned to the “Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Again” initiative, which Trump created last year via executive order to boost city policing. The officer was patrolling with special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that also sits on the local policing task force, when they saw a group of men, including one who was smoking what the officer “suspected to be a marijuana cigarette,” according to charging documents. After the police approached and searched the Mazda next to the group, they found a pistol, a husky knife and some loose rounds. Two of the men in the group said it wasn’t theirs. Another, Murdter’s client, declined to speak with officers. All three were arrested.
That kind of federal presence in local policing has exploded over the past year — a trend that continued in the lockups that day, records show.
Of the 113 cases discussed in court on Aug. 3, arrest records or charging documents were not readily available for 63 (in many instances because they were domestic-violence related and therefore not public, or because prosecutors did not pursue charges). But among the rest, the federal imprint was vast: Federal officers were present for or involved in half of the arrests.
A handful were joint D.C. police-DEA drug busts or U.S. Park Police arrests on or near federal land — typical activity in the capital city, even before Trump’s 2025 order.
Most, however, appeared to be a product of the convoy-style policing that D.C. residents have become accustomed to over the past year. Marked D.C. police cruisers, followed by a parade of marked or unmarked vehicles full of agents from an alphabet soup of federal agencies: the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection and the Diplomatic Security Service.
A quarter of the charging documents specifically stated that officers were patrolling as part of the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.” Officers with the task force stopped people for driving illegal ATVs, for smoking marijuana in public, for having license plate covers or tinted windows, for having open containers of alcohol, the arrest records show. Often, the initial alleged violation then led to other findings by police: drugs, guns.
One of the biggest factors contributing to the long days in court is the charging posture from U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro’s office, said court spokesman Doug Buchanan. Pirro, appointed by Trump, is responsible for prosecuting most adult crimes in the District.
“The truth of the matter is that federal prosecutors are moving forward with more cases rather than declining them, pushing more workload into an already overloaded system,” Buchanan wrote in an email where he described the courts as “near collapse” and in desperate need of more federal funding.
Pirro’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The number of felony cases filed in D.C. Superior Court increased by 44% last year, according to the D.C. Sentencing Commission. Half of those cases were filed between September and December.
“Not all the cases are good cases,” said Murdter, who said that he sees a lot more being dismissed relatively early in the process.
Around midday, a few dozen activists with Free D.C. — the ubiquitous face of resistance to Trump’s interventions in the District — gathered outside the courthouse to protest the surge in arrests and prosecutions.
They chanted: “We want justice, you say how? End the occupation now!”
Someone in a pink blow-up frog suit held a sign that read: “Jeanine Pirro should be disbarred.”
Behind them, in a corner by the courthouse door, was James Stroud, standing with a cart full of supplies for those emerging from the courthouse after nights in jail. He said he’s been volunteering here, offering phone calls, snacks and shoelaces to people emerging from C-10 for the past two years.
“We’ve had some days we’re out till like 1 a.m.,” he said, adding that the change had been “definitely very significant since Trump took over.”
Back inside, in the court basement, the initial hearings continued. In two cases, Murdter requested that his clients be released not from the courthouse, but from the D.C. jail. Asked later, he said that was because they were immigrants and he heard that ICE was hanging around the courthouse.
“I’m not sure how the word gets out, but it filters down,” he said.
Murdter acknowledged that some people might think immigrants who are in the country illegally and are accused of crimes should be deported. But “when I’m in here, I don’t care about the politics of it,” he said. His job is to zealously represent each client’s best interests — and it’s not in his clients’ best interests to be picked up by ICE.
The afternoon turned into evening. Some in the gallery had been sitting there for hours, waiting in the harsh air conditioning for a loved one to be called. A woman crawled inside the sleeves of her T-shirt to stay warm.
One group of friends, among the last to leave the courtroom, learned that prosecutors were declining to pursue marijuana and gun charges against them — at least for now.
“I understand they’re trying to do their job, but they overstep the boundaries,” said one of the men, recounting the way Drug Enforcement Agency officers approached their car the previous day.
The courtroom emptied at close to 8 p.m. An early night, compared to many this summer, the regulars said. “This is my bedtime,” quipped one marshal, who still wasn’t pleased.
Outside the quiet courthouse, a newly unshackled man huddled on a borrowed cellphone while the jail support team packed up. Then Stroud dragged his cart away into the night.
Everyone would be back soon, to do it all again.
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