District of Columbia

District of Columbia follows District of Columbia law on arrests, release, and courts. These rules are the same in every county in the state; the full set covers prosecutors, defense, and jails too.

Who decides release first

At the station, a police releasing official can release some people on a citation or on collateral they post and may forfeit. Everyone else sees a Superior Court magistrate judge or judge at presentment, who sets release conditions.

D.C. Code 23-1110D.C. Code 23-1321D.C. Code 11-1732

Time to see a judge

Police must bring an arrested person before the court "without unnecessary delay." No law sets a number of hours, so the federal 48-hour rule from County of Riverside v. McLaughlin is the outer limit.

D.C. Code 23-562(c)(1)

Money bail

A judge may set money bail only to make sure a person comes to court, and never in an amount that keeps the person in jail. A person the court finds dangerous is held without bail after a hearing instead.

D.C. Code 23-1321(c)(3)

Courts

The District has no counties. One trial court, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, hears every local criminal case, felony and misdemeanor alike. Federal crimes go to the separate U.S. District Court.

D.C. Code 11-923

Judges and magistrates

The President appoints Superior Court judges with the Senate's consent, for 15-year terms. The court's chief judge appoints magistrate judges, who must be lawyers, for four-year terms.

D.C. Code 11-1501D.C. Code 11-1502D.C. Code 11-1732

Read from the statutes and court rules cited, 2026-09-30. DC has no counties and no state; run_by "state" means the District government runs the jail. The 2026-09-30 pass could not open the Superior Court's Criminal Rule 5 PDF or the PDS site (both 403); the presentment rule and the PDS role rest on D.C. Code 23-562 and 2-1602. The PDS felony share rests on a search summary of PDS pages.

Pretrial practice

Mapping Pretrial Injustice listed its risk tool in 2021 as a county-specific tool (not named in the list).

MediaJustice and Movement Alliance Project, Mapping Pretrial Injustice county map (data as of fall 2021)

From Mapping Pretrial Injustice, a map compiled by MediaJustice and the Movement Alliance Project, advocacy groups that campaign against pretrial risk assessment tools. Its data is from fall 2021; CrimeDB uses it only where no court, government, or research list covers the county.

Agencies: FBI NIBRS master file 2025 batch headers; names from the FBI agency list, pulled 2026-09-29. An agency that serves several counties appears on each. Population served is the FBI's figure.