Marion Barry will not serve any jail time for his failure to federal and local taxes. He just got his probation extended for two years. Why? The U.S. Magistrate judge slams the U.S. Attorney Office’s for failing to make its case.

The Examiner writes:

U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson took more than a month to issue her ruling, in which she chastised the U.S. Attorney’s Office for sloppy trial work. She summarily struck down the prosecutor’s request to confine the former mayor, who recently underwent a kidney transplant, in his home for 30 days and put a temporary curfew on his night and weekend activities.

Barry, D-Ward 8, was accused by prosecutors of failing to file his 2007 tax returns. The 72-year-old already was on probation for failing to file his 1999-2004 returns.

Robinson took assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Zeno to task for failing to call a single witness “in an effort to prove the new criminal conduct which he alleged.”

“No authority supports the proposition that the United States Attorney may allege that a probationer violated his conditions of probation by new criminal conduct and request a hearing on that ground, and, at the hearing, call no witnesses and maintain that he need not offer any evidence at all with respect to an element of the offenses,” Robinson wrote.

Prosecutors, Robinson wrote, “failed even to attempt to demonstrate … that Defendant’s failure to timely file his 2007 tax returns was willful.”