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The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Walk around Washington, DC, and you might spot murals painted in Sean Dunn’s honor, along with yard signs featuring the DC flag—its usual thick stripes supplanted by clip-art baguettes.
Over the summer, as the Trump administration deployed members of the National Guard and ICE agents to patrol our streets and round up our immigrant neighbors, Dunn went viral for calling the federal law enforcement officers he encountered fascists and for tossing a hoagie—or hero, as the case may be—at one agent’s chest. To locals, the former Department of Justice paralegal’s stunt came across as a slapstick act of resistance in an otherwise unnerving time. To the Trump administration, it was a felony assault.
In the months since Dunn lost his government job and was arrested by a swarm of US marshals armed with guns and riot shields, he’s been idolized by many who oppose the militaristic occupation of DC. But 37-year-old Dunn rejects the hero label, telling HuffPost that the onslaught of praise has made him “uncomfortable.” So I’d like to suggest we salute a different group instead: the grand jurors who declined to indict him.
Grand jury deliberations are secretive and its members are anonymous. It’s unlikely we will ever know, definitively, why the majority of jurors opted against an indictment in Dunn’s case. But given the testimonies about strewn onions and mustard, I find it difficult to believe the group thought Dunn’s actions were completely lawful. Rather, it seems likely that Dunn benefitted from something called jury nullification: a grand jury’s decision to find someone not guilty, not because the jurors don’t believe a crime was committed, but because they felt the law—or the application of it—was unjust.
Federal prosecutors can’t formally indict someone with a felony until the majority of members serving on a grand jury agree there is “probable cause” a crime was committed. It’s much different than petit juries, where members must unanimously agree to find someone guilty of a crime. Further, petit jury deliberations take place only after hearing from prosecutors and defense attorneys, who are kept on track by a judge.
With grand juries, the prosecutors present evidence to the jurors with no judge to referee. Prosecutors are not required to share information that may be exonerating, and the defense attorneys don’t get the opportunity to speak. Paul Butler, a Georgetown law school professor, described the indictment phase of a federal trial as a “spa day” for prosecutors. It’s rare that they fail.
In fiscal year 2016, for example, federal prosecutors sought charges against 150,000 people across the country. Grand juries opted against bringing charges in just six of those cases, according to a 2020 Justice Department report. Yet, since Donald Trump was inaugurated, grand juries in DC alone have declined to issue indictments against at least six individuals. Among those was Sydney Lori Reid, a woman accused of assaulting a federal agent during an ICE raid in which Reid was pushed against a wall. Amid a scuffle with Reid, a federal agent acquired a scrape on her hand. Like Dunn, the DOJ wanted to send Reid to prison for up to eight years. Extraordinarily, three separate grand juries declined to indict her. (She later was found not guilty of a misdemeanor, as was Dunn.)
Prosecutors also failed to secure indictments against Edward Alexander Dana, a drunk and disabled man who had threatened to kill the president while being detained for property destruction at a DC restaurant; and against Paul Bryant, who was said to have shoulder-checked and threatened to kill a member of the National Guard.
“This is perhaps one of the weakest requests for detention I have seen and something that, prior to two weeks ago, would have been unthinkable in this courthouse,” US Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said in August of the government’s initial request for Bryant to be held in detention. (His case was downgraded to a misdemeanor and he presently awaits his next court date.)
To be clear: Physical aggression and threats are wrong, and in many cases criminal. But the Trump administration’s spiteful application of the law also crosses the line and impedes civility.
Seeing a summons for grand jury duty in your mailbox may seem like an unwelcome time-suck, but participation in the system has perhaps never been more important. It’s an opportunity to stand for justice as other protections against autocracy—the Constitution, the Supreme Court, traditional media—erode or fracture under pressure.
The half-dozen failed prosecutions in DC thus far may be a low bar for celebration, but then again, so is the bar for a grand jury indictment.
