Dawayne Joseph Spriggs, 35, from Washington, D.C. and Prince George’s County, Maryland, has been sentenced to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury. The sentence was announced by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro.
Spriggs pleaded guilty on June 23, 2025, to obstruction of justice in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Judge Jason Park ordered a five-year term of supervised release following his prison sentence.
A District of Columbia Grand Jury indicted Spriggs on September 13, 2023, for a 2014 cold case sexual assault. A superseding indictment filed on October 11, 2023, added the charge of obstructing justice.
“Neither time nor pressure nor obstruction will prevent this office from identifying and convicting the guilty,” said U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro. “This defendant pressured many witnesses to give false testimony and lie to cover up his violent crimes, which corrupts the principles of truth-seeking upon which our system of justice is based—it didn’t work.”
Spriggs was arrested on May 18, 2023, for sexually assaulting a stranger in July 2014. In 2016, DNA evidence linked the crime to another unsolved sexual assault reported in Anne Arundel County in 2013. In 2023, detectives from MPD’s Cold Case Sexual Assault Unit identified Spriggs as a suspect and collected DNA samples that matched both rape kits.
While awaiting trial in D.C., Spriggs engaged in efforts to obstruct justice over several months by pressuring witnesses to provide false testimony and tamper with evidence through hundreds of recorded phone calls and texts from jail. He instructed his then-girlfriend to obtain photographs of the victim from social media so associates could falsely identify her and solicited others to submit fabricated witness statements. He also directed his investigator to present these false statements to authorities with the intent that charges would be dropped.
Spriggs attempted to conceal his actions by instructing associates to delete incriminating communications and pressured a family member into committing perjury before the grand jury. His then-girlfriend pleaded guilty to attempted obstruction of justice for her involvement.
The case was prosecuted under the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia’s Cold Case Sexual Assault Initiative launched in February 2018. The initiative works with agencies such as MPD’s Sexual Assault Unit, FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, and local law enforcement partners across Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) region to solve previously unsolved cases involving adult or juvenile victims.
Chief Pamela Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department joined U.S. Attorney Pirro in announcing the sentencing decision.
U.S. Attorney Pirro and Chief Smith commended investigators from MPD who worked on this case as well as Assistant U.S. Attorney Amy Zubrensky who prosecuted it.
