A lawyer’s cry for “HELP!!!!” to get her client released from jail not only worked but saw the judge blast Washington, D.C., officials over the case.
Kristal Rios Esquivel was arrested on August 20 at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., after officials say she spat in a police sergeant’s face and kicked an officer’s leg, according to court documents. The incident occurred after police told Rios Esquivel she was being arrested for unlawful entry because she allegedly went through a door marked “Staff Only” at the zoo, the documents say.
Rios Esquivel was ordered to be released from custody after her initial court appearance on Monday, but she remained in jail, according to an emergency motion filed Tuesday by her defense attorney, Heather Shaner. She closed out the desperate plea with a single word: “HELP!!!!”
The plea worked, and U.S Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui issued a scathing filing saying the emergency motion indicates Rios Esquivel was “illegally detained.” He ordered the D.C. Department of Corrections to coordinate her release with the Justice Department by 1 p.m. that same day.
Faruqui slammed federal officials in his filing, noting Rios Esquivel should have appeared in court on Friday. However, federal authorities did not bring her to court until Monday, he said.
“This is inexcusable,” Faruqui wrote. “But it only gets worse from there.”
Faruqui initially ordered Rios Esquivel’s release after her Monday hearing, during which prosecutors asked for her to be freed “on minimal conditions of supervision.” In a footnote, Faruqui added that it is “baffling why Ms. Rios-Esquivel was then detained in the first place” in light of prosecutors’ request for her release.
Despite Faruqui ordering her release, Rios Esquivel remained in custody. Shaner explained in her emergency motion that the jail refused to release Rios Esquivel because there was still a “hit” on her in the warrant system. In his filing, Faruqui said this was the “very warrant for which she appeared on August 25” and “for which the government did not seek her detention.”
“It has now been over 19 hours since this Court ordered Ms. Rios-Esquivel’s release,” he wrote. “The Department of Corrections has chosen not to comply with this Court’s Order. This is not a choice the Department of Corrections is empowered to make.”
A Justice Department prosecutor eventually intervened to help clear the “hit,” CBS News reports, citing unnamed sources.
Faruqui also noted that “false imprisonment” is an ongoing problem in D.C.
“What is especially troubling is that this is not even the first time in the past four months that the Court has encountered this same problem of false imprisonment,” he wrote.
A DOC spokesperson confirmed Rios Esquivel was released from their custody at 12:58 p.m. on Tuesday and told The Independent officials “processed the release as expeditiously as possible while ensuring compliance with statutory requirements.” The spokesperson also noted that Faruqui issued an order vacating his Tuesday filing after her release.
“As part of this routine process, the DOC Inmate Records Office conducted standard checks of national criminal databases to determine whether there were any pending cases or detainers in other jurisdictions,” the spokesperson said. “This review identified an FBI warrant, and DOC held the individual pursuant to that warrant until it was subsequently cleared.”
The Independent has contacted Shaner and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. for comment.
This comes as prosecutors face pushback over similar cases in D.C.
This week, federal prosecutors failed to secure a felony indictment from a grand jury against Sean Charles Dunn, a D.C. man accused of throwing a sub-style sandwich at a federal agent. The so-called “sandwich guy” has since become a symbol of resistance in D.C. against President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital. He has now been charged with a misdemeanor.
Prosecutors similarly failed to secure a felony indictment from a grand jury against Sydney Reid, who is accused of assaulting a federal agent in Washington, D.C. Now, prosecutors have dropped Reid’s charge to a misdemeanor, which does not require a grand jury’s sign-off.
Reid plans to fight the charge in court, according to The Washington Post.
“The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word,” her defense attorneys Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm said in a statement. “We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”
