The Eric Adams case is a prime example of how the Trump Justice Department wields power — or tries to. The Emil Bove-led effort failed to dismiss Adams’ corruption case in a way that would’ve let the administration hold the threat of reviving the prosecution over New York City’s mayor as political leverage.
The reason Bove failed is that a judge said “no” in April. (Or at least he failed to get the Adams case dismissed “without prejudice,” anyway. President Donald Trump subsequently appointed the Trump personal defense lawyer–turned–Trump DOJ lawyer to the federal bench, despite his unresolved ethical issues — so perhaps Bove sees the Adams case as a success, or at least benign.)
More recently, another judge said “no” to the DOJ’s preferred ending to another criminal case, this one against Trevor Kirk in California. While there are differences between the Adams and Kirk cases, the latter stands as the latest example of the judiciary checking the executive on matters of crime and punishment.
Kirk was a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who was found guilty by a federal jury in February of using excessive force when he assaulted and pepper-sprayed a woman outside a supermarket in 2023. According to DOJ’s news release in connection with the guilty verdict, while he was on top of the victim, Kirk used his police radio “to give a misleading report that he was in a ‘fight.’”
But then, the Trump administration installed a new U.S. attorney for California’s Central District, Bill Essayli. The office under Essayli moved to delay Kirk’s sentencing so the new top prosecutor could “review the facts and circumstances of this case.”
The office then moved to reduce Kirk’s case from a felony to a misdemeanor and proposed a post-trial plea agreement that, if judicially approved, would give him probation. As in the Adams affair, which prompted several prosecutorial resignations, the Los Angeles Times reported that several prosecutors submitted their resignations following the plea deal’s proposal under Essayli’s leadership.
But U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson only partly agreed with Essayli’s move in May. The Reagan appointee allowed the dismissal of the felony allegations but declined to accept the probation plea agreement. Wilson reasoned that probation “does not match the facts of this case. Defendant committed the offense — the willful use of unreasonable force — while acting under color of law as a police officer. Police officers are entrusted with protecting the public, not harming them.”
So Kirk still needed to be sentenced on the misdemeanor. The judge sentenced him in June to four months in prison, giving him until Aug. 28 to self-surrender.
But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Essayli’s office then moved to fully dismiss the case — over objection of the victim, who observed that the government was “attempting to deploy a motion to dismiss to effectively overturn this Court’s prison sentence.” She said that “if the Government’s unprecedented maneuver works here, it will no doubt serve as a roadmap for other cases.”
Wilson declined to allow the gambit. In an Aug. 8 order, the judge noted that the government could’ve moved to dismiss the case ahead of sentencing. “It did not do so. Since then, nothing has changed. The Government did not uncover any new evidence. Nor did it develop any new reasons to disagree with the jury’s verdict,” Wilson wrote. “Instead,” he went on, “the record shows that the Government brings this motion to overrule the Court’s sentencing decision.”
The judge’s rebuke might not be the final twist in the story. On top of whatever happens on appeal, Wilson raised another prospect that’s all too real in the Trump era, where clemency is a routine part of the criminal justice process — or a way around it. In a footnote on the final page of his order, the judge wrote that his denial “does not leave the Government without options if it truly believes Defendant should not serve prison time. Like in any criminal case, the Executive may exercise its pardon power to relieve Defendant of his sentence. That power is ‘unlimited’ and, unlike Rule 48(a) [the procedural rule governing dismissals], is not subject to judicial review for whether it is contrary to the public interest.” With a prison surrender date set for later this month, we could soon learn whether Trump will exercise his pardon power or, if he doesn’t feel like sending a message of full vindication but wants to keep the lawman out of prison, commute Kirk’s sentence. Until then, as in the Adams case, the judiciary stands as something of a bulwark against the government’s moves to completely bend the justice system to its own ends. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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