The prosecutions from the U.S. Capitol insurrection are flooding the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, threatening to slow the processing of cases and stretching the resources and public defenders in the court system (article available here).
In a series of court filings, prosecutors have also indicated the cases involving accused Capitol insurrectionists could be uniquely lengthy and complicated. In one filing in the case of a group of 10 accused members of the far-right Oath Keepers organization, the Justice Department said the investigations are large in “size and scope.”
The filing said, “Indeed, given the government has already obtained more than 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage from multiple law enforcement agencies, merely identifying and producing the footage showing only ten defendants … over a period of a few hours is itself a difficult task.
According to court records, the D.C. federal court had processed 266 criminal cases in the first three months of 2021. The records showed that’s nearly as many as the court handled in all of 2020, when it processed 283 cases.