WASHINGTON — A D.C. Superior Court judge on Monday encouraged the Trump administration to preserve the sections of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that it says a Maryland man damaged to ensure the case moves forward.
Associate Judge Todd E. Edelman warned during a status hearing in the case against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn that the government may be “operating at its own peril” if it does not preserve the pool for the defense attorneys and their expert to examine and test.
Edelman questioned why the Trump administration couldn’t “maintain the status quo” for the rest of the week to ensure access to the evidence doesn’t become an “issue in this trial.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Reddington said the Interior Department was in the middle of remedial work on the Reflecting Pool after draining it.
Reddington said prosecutors “certainly asked them to hold the site as a whole,” but added he doesn’t have control over whether they do.
Edelman then encouraged the “government to not do anything further” on the Reflecting Pool before denying without prejudice Hearn’s defense team’s motion to dismiss the case. He said the effort was “entirely premature” but didn’t prevent the lawyers’ from filing a different motion to dismiss in the future.
Mary Dohrmann, a principal at Washington Litigation Group and one of Hearn’s lawyers, wrote in the motion to dismiss the “Constitution simply does not permit the government to charge a man with destroying an object, retain exclusive custody of that object, and then drain, disturb, and alter the object before the defense may examine it, despite a written demand for its preservation.”
“And yet that is what has happened here,” Dohrmann added. “The government’s failure to preserve this evidence, in the face of an express demand no less, has destroyed Mr. Hearn’s ability to collect evidence material to his defense on multiple elements of the charged offense. Dismissal is the only appropriate remedy in view of the government’s actions.”
Edelman scheduled a readiness hearing for Sept. 11 and set the trial to begin on Sept. 28.
