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Well no offense but that you had read it at all and didn't have little alarm bells blaring in your head to double check that California would have volunteer criminal grand juries is still what I mean by ignorance of the system. That would be incredibly shocking to learn any state did it that way.
I'm not saying there isn't any, but even when we stack the deck and assume that every single Harris voter is a super partisan radical again we still only hit 36% of the total population that is biased in this way, in California one of the bluest leaning states. Also age and intelligence bias go the other way for juries. Random chance might get a few grand juries where they stack the deck with blue partisans, but they're disproportionately smarter, younger and higher income people who will get out of jury duty easier!
For the most part of any grand jury anywhere you're gonna have to deal with convincing a bunch of normies who couldn't manage to get out and bored retirees who are just happy to be doing something again. And often those times where you think someone got off unfair is really just because you didn't understand the specifics of the law just like you didn't understand criminal grand juries. There's multiple understandable parts, if you know the specifics, why he didn't get indicted.
The government's laughable attemps to upcharge it as a felony. The cop laughing it off later as no big deal (and lying in court about the details too for some reason) made it harder to suggest there was a reasonable chance of bodily harm in the sandwich throwing given that it didn't result in harm. (It's not impossible since we're talking about chances, but juries see "X happened and Y didn't" as evidence that X causing Y is less likely then), that they had originally released him without charge until the scene went viral later weakened their case significantly (if it was clearly assault to them, they should have pressed then and not let him go) suggesting politically motivated prosecution rather than fact based ones which the felony upcharging and public statements by the Trump admin did not help. And the history that other "soft objects" throwers don't normally get charged under this statute weakened the case even more from that.
That a grand jury refused to indict a hilariously upcharged felony assault over a case which was blatantly politicized in prosecution motive, one that the officers themselves had initially treated as no big deal and nothing to charge over is not that much of a surprise. They then had to cut it down to a misdemeanor, but given the already rocky history and details here and the still hilarious allegations that the sandwich caused bodily harm, the petit jury at trial found him not guilty. Sean Dunn was probably guilty of something, but through multiple unforced errors of choosing stupid statutes to charge him under, letting him go to begin with, blatant politicized prosecution motives, etc the prosecution really hurt their chances at what could have been a slam dunk. They wanted to make an example out of him and fucked up.
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