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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10016 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Your argument proves too much: the Trump administration also had difficulty securing a grand jury in cases where they had video evidence of the crime.

Which case was this? The first thing that came to my mind was a vague recollection of the recent reported paper-bag-of-bribery-sting-cash video, but the suspect there (despite being first appointed to ICE by Obama) was considered "one of the president's top allies" and it was the Trump DoJ that dropped the case.

In addition to the other examples already presented, I'd point to the difficulties in DC enforcement in clear-cut cases, and, for a non-grand-jury indictment, Don Lemon through a magistrate judge.

There was the sandwich guy in DC who threw his food at federal officers and was a found innocent of all charges, and within DC is now regarded as a local folk hero for standing up to the federal government or whatever.

Do you know what the precise charges were? I see news stories saying "assault", which, yeah, he was totally guilty by the dictionary meaning, but laws usually get much more fine-grained than that.

DC does allow juries to convict on a "lesser included offense" when the charge is for a greater offense that necessarily includes the lesser offense, so there's no way for a criminal-friendly or just-stupid DA there to let a criminal walk away free from a misdemeanor assault by mischarging them with felony assault instead.

But it might have mattered to the jury if prosecutors overcharged; jury nullification is so much easier to pull off if the DA pisses off the jury first.

Or ... does DC even define an appropriate level of assault charge? In Texas I think this would be a Class C Misdemeanor Assault, offensive contact without physical injury, but the weakest assault level I can find in DC is "Simple Assault" which requires there to be an attempt "to do injury to the person of another", and it wouldn't be crazy for a jury to decide that a short-range ballistic sandwich just wasn't possibly going to do any injury. Maybe there was no better charge possible than misdemeanor destruction of property, if the mustard stains just wouldn't come out?

(IANAL, IANYL, please don't throw food at anyone anywhere or encourage others to do so, etc.)

That was kind of doomed from the start with a DC jury. In this case they were able to file in Alabama, which should have a more level playing field.

The outsized sway of DC and NY juries on federal law enforcement has seemed like a viable opportunity for reform, but I haven't seen any political operatives (conservative, presumably) actually talking about it.

Grand juries have long been considered incredibly easy to get past, to the point a common joke is that you could even manage it with a ham sandwich. Given that nothing about the system has changed (they're still just made up of ordinary citizens through the jury selection process), the constant failings to convince ordinary people of crime seems to suggest a selection bias. Normal smart prosecutors would never try to indict a ham sandwich anyway so the grand juries never turn them down, similar to how Japan maintains their high conviction rates.

Given that nothing about the system has changed (they're still just made up of ordinary citizens through the jury selection process)

Several of the failures to indict have been -- and been clearly downstream -- of jury pools where a heavy and radicalized Blue Tribe lean is present.

similar to how Japan maintains their high conviction rates.

By treating ‘rights of the accused’ as a suggestion?

Probably in part, but they also don't bring the indictments in Japan to begin with. https://usali.org/comparative-views-of-japanese-criminal-justice/carlos-ghosn-and-japans-99-per-cent-conviction-ratenbsp-examining-japans-criminal-justice-system-from-a-comparative-perspective

In Japan the majority of cases are cleared by prosecutors through the exercise of broad discretion to refrain from bringing any indictment. Unlike plea bargains in the US, the suspect receives no punishment and has no criminal record. Prosecutors decide to indict in fewer than one-third of the referred cases (see here and here for Japanese FY2017 data in English). Some 90% of the cases indicted in district courts result in confessions and guilty pleas, although in Japan these cases still go to trial. The remaining 10% of the indicted cases are contested at trial.

There are some other differences including just weird statistical quirks like that, but being selective in only bringing high confidence cases is a good thing for both efficient use of taxpayer money and minimizing harassment of innocents.

If his characterization of a specific case is correct, none of what you said is relevant. It's perfectly possible that on average things are more or less lime you describe, but people make an exception for Trump.

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