General Discussion

We know that a grand jury in Washington refused to indict sandwich thrower Sean Dunn. But we don’t necessarily know why.

It’s a stunning result with serious implications no matter what motivated the rejection. Yet, what those implications are, exactly, could depend on the rationale for refusing to approve a felony charge against the man who became a folk hero in D.C. amid the Trump administration’s federal crackdown in the nation’s capital......

But something bigger may have been at play: jury nullification. That’s when jurors believe that prosecutors have proved the technical elements of the case but, nonetheless, the jury renders a moral objection by way of a not guilty verdict (or in the case of a grand jury, a “no true bill”).

To put the question one way: Did grand jurors think the government did a bad job, or a bad thing?.....

Importantly, we have more than Dunn’s case to go on in analyzing this phenomenon. There’s the even more shocking recent failure of D.C. prosecutors to get an indictment against Sidney Reid a whopping three times. She was initially charged under the same federal assault statute as Dunn. After striking out in the grand jury, prosecutors reduced her case to a misdemeanor, which doesn’t require grand jury approval.

Let’s assume for a moment that grand jurors in both the Dunn and Reid cases just thought there wasn’t enough proof to charge them with felonies. The known facts of both cases certainly allow for that possibility. Through that lens, the message to prosecutors is that they need to more carefully evaluate the quality of cases they bring.

But if the message is that the people of D.C. are declining to approve charges despite the evidence presented to them, that’s something that should worry prosecutors even more.