Pirro’s office now says what it asked for at sentencing. Judges gave less in 56 of 59 federal cases.

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — For most of the past year, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced that someone had been sentenced, its press releases reported the prison term and left out what prosecutors had asked the judge to impose. In mid-April that changed. Releases began to include a new sentence, usually near the end: “Federal prosecutors had requested a prison sentence of” so many months.

A Washington Inquisitor review of every press release the office has posted since November 2025 found 59 sentencings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, from April 13 through Oct. 19, in which the office stated a specific prison term it had requested. In 56 of them, the judge imposed less. In 3, the judge imposed exactly what prosecutors sought. In none did a judge go higher.

Taken together, prosecutors asked for 4,535 months of prison time in those cases — about 378 years. Judges imposed 3,233 months, or about 269 years: 71 percent of what the government requested. The median case saw a sentence 15 months shorter than the request.

The figures do not show that judges in Washington are lenient, and they are not a random sample of federal sentencings. The office decides which cases to announce and, within those, when to mention its own request. What the releases do document is a deliberate change in how U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro’s office presents the outcome of its cases — one that, by design or not, places the judge’s decision next to a larger number — and the pattern of results it chose to publish.

How the Inquisitor built the data

The Justice Department publishes every component’s press releases through a public data feed. The Inquisitor downloaded all releases posted from Nov. 13, 2025, through Oct. 19, 2026, isolated the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. releases, and searched their text for language stating a government sentencing request. Each of the 59 federal cases in the analysis was then read individually to confirm the judge’s name, the requested term and the term imposed.

A few judgment calls were required. Where the office stated a range, the bottom of the range was used, which narrows rather than widens the gap. A request for “a minimum of” a term was coded at that term. A sentence of a year and a day was coded as 12 months. Supervised release, fines, restitution and forfeiture were not counted. A case announced by both the D.C. office and the department’s national press office was counted once. Cases in D.C. Superior Court, where the same office prosecutes local crimes, are discussed separately below, and one Superior Court case involving a defendant who was a juvenile at the time of the offense was excluded entirely under the Inquisitor’s standards.

A policy change in the press office

The shift is visible in the office’s own output. In releases with “sentenced” in the headline, the Inquisitor found none from mid-November through March that stated the government’s request in the language the office now uses; two releases in that period, both about Superior Court cases and with different headlines, did mention a request. From April onward, 60 of 123 such releases did.

The Inquisitor found no explanation of the change in the office’s releases. On at least one occasion it has paired the number with criticism of the judge. When a former drug-store manager was sentenced in May to 32 months for her role in seven armed robberies of a Chinatown Walgreens, the office’s release noted that prosecutors had sought 100 months and quoted Ms. Pirro: “The sentencing guidelines called for 87-to-108 months. This sentence, which is significantly lighter, does little to protect the citizens of the District.” In a Superior Court murder case the same month, a release stated that the government had requested 21 years “but his sentencing was at the bottom end of the guidelines.” The defendant received 10.5 years.

What the numbers show, by type of case

Gun cases dominate the list. Of the 25 gun-possession sentencings — most of them involving people previously convicted of a felony — 19 were brought under what the office calls the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Initiative, described in its releases as “a law enforcement initiative in support of President Trump’s Executive Order to crack down on gun violence, prioritize federal firearms violations, pursue tougher penalties, and seek detention for federal firearms violators.” In those 19 initiative cases, the median request was 46 months and the median sentence 30; judges imposed 65 percent of the requested time overall.

Drug cases came closest to the government’s numbers: judges imposed 79 percent of the requested time across 15 cases. Federal drug law sets mandatory minimum prison terms for offenses involving larger quantities, which can narrow the distance between what prosecutors seek and what a judge may impose. Fraud and corruption cases showed the widest gap, though there were only 6 of them; in one, a dentist convicted at trial of Medicaid fraud, prosecutors sought 108 months and the judge imposed 24.

In 8 of the 59 cases, the sentence was half the request or less. In 31, it was less than three-quarters.

By judge

Twenty-one district judges appear in the data. Ten handled three or more of the cases. With so few cases each, a single long or short sentence can move a judge’s percentage substantially, and the cases assigned to each judge differ in seriousness.

Judge Amir H. Ali appears most often, with 9 cases, 6 of them gun cases; he imposed less than the request in each. Judge Timothy J. Kelly’s five sentences totaled 90 percent of what prosecutors requested, the highest share among judges with at least five cases. Judge Jia M. Cobb’s five totaled 49 percent, the lowest; her cases include the Walgreens robbery sentencing that drew Ms. Pirro’s criticism. The three sentences that matched the request came from Judges Carl J. Nichols, Beryl A. Howell and Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

Federal judges are required by 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) to impose a sentence “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to meet the purposes of sentencing, after weighing factors including the nature of the offense, the defendant’s history and the need to avoid unwarranted disparities. The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines are advisory. Defense lawyers file their own recommendations, which the office’s releases do not report; a sentence below the government’s request may be well above what the defense sought.

Superior Court

The office also prosecutes local crimes in D.C. Superior Court, and its releases there show a similar pattern on a smaller scale. Since April, it has announced a five-year sentence in an assault case in which, its release said, “the Government asked for the top of the sentencing guidelines—13 years in prison”; the 10.5-year murder sentence noted above, against a 21-year request; and a 24-month sentence in a strangulation case that matched the government’s request, the guideline maximum. In a June vehicular homicide case, the office reported that the court agreed in part to its request for a sentence above the guidelines.

What the data cannot say

Three limits apply to any reading of these numbers. First, the sample is the office’s choice: it does not announce every sentencing, and roughly half of its sentencing releases since April do not mention a request at all, so it is not possible to say from the releases whether judges imposed the requested term more often in cases the office did not highlight. Second, the requests are the office’s own characterization and were not checked against sentencing memoranda in each case. Third, the comparison ignores the defense’s position and the guidelines range, which the releases rarely state.

What the releases do show is that, in every federal case the office has chosen to announce with its request since April, the judge’s sentence was at or below the government’s number — and that the office has begun making that comparison a routine part of how it tells the public about its work.

The cases

Photo: The E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse, home of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Photo by Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.