Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui
District of Columbia U.S. District Court
Zia Faruqui earned both his undergraduate and Juris Doctor degrees from Georgetown University. He entered private practice as a litigation attorney.
He served twelve years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s offices in St. Louis and Washington, D.C.
He was appointed as a United States Magistrate Judge in September 2020.
In the News…
A judge warned the Justice Department on Monday that it might be seeking to pursue so many cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion that some defendants’ rights were being violated.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui delivered the rebuke to federal prosecutors at a hearing for a Texas man who the judge said was “lost” in the court system after being arrested in December and accused of assaulting police officers during the storming of the Capitol.
“You have been lost for months,” Judge Faruqui told Lucas Denney of Mansfield, Texas, during a hearing in a Washington courtroom. “There’s no excuse to treat a human being like that. … There is no circumstance under which any person should be forgotten.”
Judge Faruqui said the mammoth nature of the federal investigation, which has led to charges against more than 750 people, was no justification for Denney’s languishing in custody.
“The government has chosen to charge the largest case ever,” said the magistrate judge, who noted he was formerly a federal prosecutor in the same U.S. Attorney’s Office leading the investigation. “If they do not have the resources to do it, they ought not do that. … It feels like the government has bitten off more than it can chew here.”
Contact this Leader…
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The Honorable Zia Faruqui
Magistrate Judge for D.C. District Court
333 Constitution Ave NW
Washington, DC 20001
