Meridian Hill Park (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
A U.S. District Court jury in D.C. on Sept. 27 found a Virginia man not guilty of multiple charges that he assaulted five men, four of whom he believed to be gay, with pepper spray between 2018 and 2021 in D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park, which is also known as Malcolm X Park.
The verdict came a little over two years after a federal grand jury handed down an indictment charging Michael Thomas Pruden, 50, with five counts of assault on federal park land, one count of impersonating a federal officer, and a hate crime designation alleging that he assaulted four of the men because of their perceived sexual orientation.
The indictment states, and witnesses at the trial testified, that Meridian Hill Park is well known as a “cruising” place where men seek out other men for consenting sexual encounters during nighttime hours.
“Michael Thomas Pruden frequented Meridian Hill Park after nightfall on multiple occasions, including those described below, assaulted men in Meridian Hill Park by approaching them with a flashlight, giving them police-style commands, and spaying them with a chemical irritant,” the indictment states. The indictment was handed down by a federal grand jury on June 29, 2022.
Court records show that Pruden was arrested two weeks later on July 14, 2022, in Norfolk, Va., where he was living at that time. Records show he had been living in Oxon Hill, Md., at the time he allegedly committed the assaults in Meridian Hill Park.
Reports surfaced at the time of Pruden’s arrest that he is a former Maryland elementary school teacher.
Pruden’s lead attorney, Alexis Morgan Gardner, who is an assistant federal public defender, argued during the trial that Pruden himself is a gay man who regularly visited Meridian Hill Park. She told the jury that Pruden was misidentified as the perpetrator in the attacks by each of the victims who testified that they recognized Pruden as their attacker.
The two lead prosecutors in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew Cherry and Timothy Visser, argued that each of the victims who testified at the trial identified Pruden as the person who sprayed them with pepper spray after shining a flashlight in their eyes. The prosecutors pointed out that during an investigation of the assaults by the U.S. Park Police, each of the victims identified Pruden from an array of photos that included photos of several other men and Pruden.
The prosecutors noted that Meridian Hill Park is among the federal parks in D.C. that U.S. Park Police oversee.
The victims testified that their attacker identified himself as a police officer or a security guard and gave them police-like commands to leave the park on grounds that it is closed to the public after nightfall.
But during intense cross examination of the victims on the witness stand, Gardner argued that each of their accounts of the attacks during their trial testimony conflicted with statements they made to police or FBI agents, who also became involved in the investigation, at the time they were interviewed by either police or the FBI during the investigation.
At one point during Gardner’s questioning one of the victims, Carl Williams, Williams yelled at Gardner, angrily saying he believed the police reports of his account of what happened were inaccurate in some of the details and that his statements during his trial testimony were the correct version of what happened at the park on the night he says he was assaulted by Pruden.
“I’m not sure what I may have said,” he told Gardner while testifying. “I did not say it the way it was written,” he said, referring to a police report that Gardner told the jury had conflicting information from what Williams said when he was questioned by one of the prosecutors on the witness stand.
Gardner also pointed out that Williams himself has been charged and convicted of violating park rules at Meridian Hill Park by going there at night when it was legally “closed’ to the public.
The jury’s verdict came on the second day of its deliberations and after U.S. District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb instructed the jury that, as in all criminal cases, they should not render a verdict of guilt unless they believe the evidence presented by the government proved the defendant committed the crimes beyond a reasonable doubt.
Pruden’s acquittal on Sept. 27 marked the second time he has been acquitted by a jury in a trial on charges that he targeted gay men for assault in a park.
In September 2021, a U.S. District Court jury in Alexandria, Va., found him not guilty of a charge of assault with a dangerous weapon for allegedly pepper spraying and striking in the head with a tree branch a man in Daingerfield Island park in Alexandria. That park is also known as a gay male cruising site.
Federal court records in Virginia show that the Daingerfield Island assault took place on March 21, 2021, five days before the D.C. grand jury indictment against Prudent says he allegedly assaulted the fifth victim in the Meridian Hill Park attacks on March 26, 2021.
During the trial in the Meridian Hill case, Cherry and Visser argued that any inconsistencies between the testimony by the victims and their statements to police investigators two years or more earlier did not change the overall evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Pruden committed each of the offenses he was charged with.
The jury’s decision to acquit Pruden on all charges indicates jurors believed Gardner and co-defense attorney Courtney Millian from the Office of the Federal Public Defender for D.C. provided sufficient evidence that prosecutors did not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Gardner did not respond to a request from the Washington Blade for comment on the jury’s verdict.
Although the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. almost always issues a press release announcing a jury conviction in cases that it prosecutes, in this case spokesperson Patricia Hartman said no statement would be released.
“We respect the jury’s decision,” Hartman told the Blade.
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