His wrists chained together, the man in the orange jumpsuit struggled to unfold a single, heavily wrinkled piece of paper.
He turned from the defendant’s table back to the gallery of the courtroom so he could look me in the eye.
And then the man who five months earlier busted through my family’s basement door and made his way through almost every room, cabinet and drawer in the house said this:
“I want to extend my apologies to you, sir. I can’t create enough words to describe how ashamed I am.”
Rodney Knight pleaded guilty to burglarizing my house last December, as well as to possessing a loaded 9mm pistol without a license when D.C. police caught up with him a month later. In D.C. Superior Court early this month, with Judge Anthony Epstein about to pass down Knight’s sentence, the burglar asked me to forgive him.
But whether I cared to accept our burglar’s apology hardly mattered. The criminal justice system — from the cops to the prosecutors to the judge — had already given him plenty of breaks.
The police, who responded with startling speed and numbers to our initial 911 call, made it clear from the get-go that although they’d love to catch our crook, burglaries — and property crimes in general — just aren’t taken seriously. The system was too overwhelmed by more serious offenses. Sure, they’d dust for fingerprints, but even as they did so, they told us that no one would ever look at them.
The prosecutor, who worked hard to bring a case against the burglar, nonetheless aggressively angled to cut a deal with him, offering to dismiss half the charges in exchange for a guilty plea. The primary goal was to avoid a trial, even though our case arguably had some remarkably damning evidence: a photo of the criminal, holding (and wearing) the stolen goods, taken just after the burglary and posted on Facebook for all the world to see.
Knight’s defense counsel, Joel Davidson, asked the judge to go easy on his client. “He’s really had a fairly minimal criminal history,” the lawyer said of a 19-year-old who had already been arrested seven times, faced criminal charges in Virginia, New York and the District, and skipped out on court appearances twice — and that’s not even counting his juvenile record.
The prosecutor didn’t disagree. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Lewis offered praise for Knight’s cooperation and thanks to the burglar’s girlfriend and family for their support and presence in court. (“If we’re ever going to make a difference in crime in this city,” Lewis explained later, “we need to win the trust and support of people like this family.”)
Then Epstein, after assuring me that “I take property crimes very seriously,” sentenced Knight — who before the plea bargain faced up to 15 years in prison — to a term of 31 / 2 years: 27 months for the burglary and 17 months for the weapons offense.
That, everyone involved told me, is an unusually stiff sentence “for a burglary.” It is a significant punishment, but listen again to what the police and lawyers were really saying: Even a relatively modest prison term is unusual for a property crime.
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