The name wasn't notable. Neither was the sentence. But when Dewayne Gaffney was convicted in D.C. Superior Court and sent to prison this summer, it did not go unnoticed.
Gaffney, who was accused of lying to a grand jury in a murder case, was tried for perjury. It was the first time in nearly three years that the U.S. attorney's office took a perjury charge to trial in Superior Court, and more cases were coming.
So far this year, prosecutors in Superior Court have charged six people with the crime -- almost as many as were charged in the previous three years combined. Many prosecutors contend that the action is overdue, saying that lying witnesses have hampered or crippled their cases. But defense attorneys are fearful that perjury charges will be abused by prosecutors seeking the upper hand at trial.
Although the U.S. attorney's office has said there is no coordinated effort, the cases now proceeding through the court reflect mounting frustration among prosecutors. Perjury, they say, is pervasive in the District's criminal justice system because witnesses have come to think that they can lie without fear of punishment.
"I've always felt that we don't file them enough, nearly enough," said one experienced homicide prosecutor, who like other line attorneys is not in a policymaking role and would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Not surprising in a city struggling with gun violence, five of the six perjury cases stem from testimony about shootings, most of them fatal.
In the city's most violent neighborhoods, residents often are reluctant to come forward with information about serious, even deadly, crimes, authorities said. Some witnesses fear retribution or do not trust police, or both. Others simply are defiant, prosecutors said.
When investigators are able to track them down, witnesses frequently are not forthcoming -- part of a code, prosecutors said, that tolerates, even encourages, lying to police, prosecutors and jurors.
U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, who inherited the crop of cases from his predecessor, Roscoe C. Howard Jr., said he is committed to prosecuting perjury.
"The importance of it is in making it clear to the rest of the world that if you lie in the grand jury, there are consequences," said Wainstein, who was appointed in May. "The system won't work if people think they can lie with impunity."
After winning a conviction in the Gaffney case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Denise Cheung, knowing that several other cases were in the pipeline, put together an internal primer about perjury, according to people who saw the document. Cheung, they said, wanted to give colleagues knowledge about what worked in the case -- and what didn't.
Last week, prosecutors won a perjury conviction against a witness in another case after a man whose trial had just begun pleaded guilty. Next month, two more perjury cases are scheduled for trial, and another is set for November.
Many defense attorneys said that as admirable as the pursuit of truth and justice is, it may not be well served by attacking suspected perjury so aggressively.
"Rather than changing a culture, I suspect [prosecutors] are going to drive people away who would otherwise speak to them, because they're afraid," said Ferris Bond, a veteran D.C. defense lawyer.
