President Trump on Wednesday issued full and unconditional pardons to two Washington, D.C., police officers convicted after a chase that killed a young Black man in 2020, an episode that led to days of protests and clashes in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Trump granted clemency to Officer Terence Sutton of the Metropolitan Police Department, who was sentenced last year to more than five years in prison for second-degree murder and obstruction of justice in the unauthorized pursuit, which killed the man, 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown. Officer Sutton was the first D.C. police officer to be convicted of murder for actions on duty.
The other pardon recipient, Lt. Andrew Zabavsky, was sentenced to four years in prison not directly for the killing of Mr. Hylton-Brown, but for conspiring with Mr. Sutton to cover up the deadly police chase. The two had been free pending the outcome of their appeals.
Issuing the pardons was Mr. Trump’s second high-profile act of clemency during the first week of his term, and one that now involves him in a case that incited backlash against the police department operating just outside the White House.
Just two days after he issued clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — including some accused of assaulting or impeding law enforcement officers — Mr. Trump used his power to give a reprieve to the officers convicted in Mr. Hylton-Brown’s death.
On Tuesday, he had hinted at the pardons, which prevent any punishment associated with the convictions.
“They were arrested, put in jail for five years because they went after an illegal,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday. “And I guess something happened where something went wrong, and they arrested the two officers and put them in jail for going after a criminal.”
In fact, Mr. Hylton-Brown was an American citizen, said David L. Shurtz, a lawyer representing the Hylton-Brown estate. And it was the police officers, not Mr. Hylton-Brown, who were found to have committed a crime that amounted to “a disservice to the community and the thousands of officers who work incredibly hard, within the bounds of the Constitution, to keep us safe,” Matthew M. Graves, then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a statement when the officers were sentenced in September.
The D.C. Police Union, which had expressed “dismay” over the Jan. 6 pardons, praised Mr. Trump’s decision on clemency for the two officers as righting “an incredible wrong.”
In October 2020, as the nation was still reeling from the protests after the murder of George Floyd months earlier in Minneapolis, Officer Sutton and Lieutenant Zabavsky spotted Mr. Hylton-Brown driving a moped on a sidewalk while not wearing a helmet. Mr. Hylton-Brown ignored Officer Sutton’s attempt to stop him and drove off, prosecutors in the case said.
Officer Sutton chased Mr. Hylton-Brown for 10 blocks, including at one point by driving the wrong way on a one-way street. He pursued Mr. Hylton-Brown into a narrow alley, turned off his vehicle’s emergency lights and sirens and accelerated. When Mr. Hylton-Brown exited the alley, he was hit by another vehicle, according to prosecutors.
“As Mr. Hylton-Brown lay unconscious in the street in a pool of his own blood, Sutton and Zabavsky agreed to cover up what Sutton had done to prevent any further investigation of the incident,” according to the September statement.
The officers allowed the driver who hit Mr. Hylton-Brown to leave the scene 20 minutes after the collision, prosecutors said. Officer Sutton was accused of driving over the crash debris, and both officers were accused of misleading a commanding officer about the severity of the crash. Lieutenant Zabavksy falsely implied that Mr. Hylton-Brown had been drunk, according to prosecutors.
The fatal crash prompted days of occasionally volatile protests outside a police station in Washington.
Mr. Shurtz, the lawyer for Mr. Hylton-Brown’s relatives, accused Mr. Trump of pardoning the officers at the behest of police unions.
“He is backing up the most corrupt police department,” Mr. Shurtz said.
The Metropolitan Police Department released a statement thanking Mr. Trump “for supporting our officers.”
“Never before, in any other jurisdiction in the country, has a police officer been charged with second-degree murder for pursuing a suspect,” the department said in a statement. “These members could never have imagined that engaging in a core function of their job would be prosecuted as a crime.”
J. Michael Hannon, Officer Sutton’s lawyer, said in an interview that he had anticipated the U.S. attorney would “request the courts to vacate the guilty verdict against Officer Sutton and to dismiss the indictment because he has always been an innocent man.”
Christopher Zampogna, representing Lieutenant Zabavsky, said in a statement that his client “thanks President Donald J. Trump for his decision to grant him a full and unconditional pardon.”
