After ruling that federal prosecutors withheld key evidence resulting in a defendant’s wrongful imprisonment, D.C.’s top court took nearly a decade to decide on an appropriate sanction. In December, after extensive hearings, the D.C. Court of Appeals gave two prosecutors a year of probation plus a stern warning not to commit any further misconduct, or they would be suspended from practicing law for six months.

Both prosecutors, Mary Chris Dobbie and Reagan Taylor, still work for the Justice Department, according to media reports and other records. One of their former supervisors, Jeffrey Ragsdale, currently leads the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which oversees investigations into alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

Under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys. At the trial for two defendants accused of assaulting an officer during a jailhouse brawl, Dobbie and Taylor withheld unequivocal evidence that their lead witness, a corrections officer, had a history of filing false reports. Based on the officer’s testimony, one defendant was imprisoned for more than four years before his conviction was reversed.

In 2021, the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, a disciplinary panel appointed by the appeals court, unanimously recommended a six-month suspension for Dobbie and Taylor. But in a divided opinion, the court ratcheted down the sanction to probation based on “one overriding mitigating circumstance”: the “deficient conduct” of Ragsdale and another supervisor, John Roth, who later served as inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security. There were no ethics charges or misconduct findings for either supervisor.

Reached by phone, Roth declined to comment, saying that he was not aware of the decision. Attorneys for Dobbie and Taylor did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did Ragsdale. The Justice Department also failed to respond.

The dissenting judge, Joshua Deahl, argued that Dobbie and Taylor “should face real consequences for their actions.”

“The board comes to us — despite innumerable favorable inferences drawn in respondents’ favor — with the rare recommendation of an actual suspension that at least comes close to reflecting the gravity of this serious prosecutorial misconduct,” Deahl wrote. “Yet this court balks.”

Deahl noted a dissonance between how courts treat prosecutors’ ethical violations versus misconduct by private attorneys, who are routinely disbarred or suspended for actions like dipping into client funds.

“That is too harsh a result, the majority concludes, when prosecutors intentionally suppress evidence in violation of the Constitution and thereby secure felony convictions resulting in years of unjust imprisonment,” wrote Deahl, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019 and served as a public defender before joining the bench.

Even this relatively lenient sanction is a rarity for federal prosecutors. And the........

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