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If disgraced former D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown has any late night plans between now and his Nov. 13 sentencing for bank fraud, he’d better cancel them. After missing three pretrial phone check-ins, Brown was put on a curfew by Judge Richard Leon at a hearing this morning.
“This isn’t the way you position yourself most favorably for your sentencing,” Leon told Brown. Brown missed phone check-ins, one each in June, July, and September. Despite Brown’s excuses—-traveling, or contacting pretrial services ahead of a call—-Leon doubted that Brown’s lawyer, Fred Cooke Jr., wouldn’t have explained the pretrial call rules to him.
“I will be making every single call whenever asked of me,” Brown told Leon. But he won’t be making phone call check-ins anymore—-under Leon’s new rules, Brown now must check with pretrial services in person.
Leon spoke harshly to Brown, warning him not to tempt fate and returning to the theme that Brown had exhausted his three strikes. “Don’t be back here until your day of sentencing, you hear me?” Leon told Brown, shaking his finger at him.
Under his new curfew, Brown has to be home between 11 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. every night. Leon initially wanted the curfew to end at 7 a.m., but agreed to a request from Cooke to make it end earlier so Brown can drive his children in the morning.
In an elevator after the hearing, Brown claimed to be amazed that so many reporters came to his hearing instead of covering problems at Natwar Gandhi‘s Office of the Chief Financial Officer.
But he spent most of the ride talking to a woman in the elevator about the weather. “It’s going to be a cold winter,” Brown told her.
Photo by Darrow Montgomery