A class action has been filed against the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia on behalf of all underage persons who have been arrested, subjected to search and seizure, handcuffed, booked, or otherwise detained for violations of Washington D.C.’s criminal statute against underage possession of alcohol on or after April 9, 1997. The action alleges that, on that date, the statute was amended so that it no longer provides for any criminal penalties, yet police and prosecutors continue making false arrests and maliciously filing criminal charges as though it did. The action seeks expungement of all arrest, prosecution, and court records of all those arrested under the statute since that time, and unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

In 1997, the District of Columbia decriminalized the underage possession of alcohol within the nation’s capital when the City Council revised an existing law to eliminate criminal penalties and provide exclusively for a civil fine and the possibility of a temporary suspension of driving privileges for committing the offense. This decision was made in response to a D.C. Court of Appeals decision (District of Columbia v. Morrissey, 1995), in which the Court pointed out that the penalty for underage possession were greater than those for possession of a controlled substance, driving while intoxicated, or even furnishing alcohol to a minor.

The action alleges that the Council’s decriminalization of the offense made no difference in the manner that police and prosecutors dealt with the offense. Based on possession of alcohol by a person under the age of 21, police allegedly continued to conduct searches and seizures and arrests, and went through the process of handcuffing, frisking, transporting, photographing, fingerprinting, booking, and jailing suspects. Further, prosecutors allegedly continued to utilize the courts to prosecute the same persons as though there was a law on the books that would allow them to do so. In some cases, prosecutors allegedly chose not to charge an arrested person, even though they had been arrested and detained under the underage possession statute.

In 1998, Brett Cass was arrested and convicted of violating the underage possession law. He appealed his conviction to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. On July 31, 2003 , the Court declared that the statute in question did not provide for criminal penalties. On October 6, 2003, in a supplemental opinion in the same case, the same court amended its July 31, 2003, decision in the Cass case solely and explicitly to state that a violation of the underage possession law is not a criminal offense. Despite these two decisions, the police and prosecutors have allegedly proceeded in their relentless pursuit of criminal arrests and prosecutions of underage persons for the possession of alcohol. Under the D.C. Code, a police officer is only authorized to make an arrest without a warrant if there is probable cause to believe that a person has committed or is committing a felony, or has probable cause to believe that a person has committed or is committing a misdemeanor in his or her presence.