Legal expert warns hostile juries 'will spread' as Trump admin's abuse grows
Former prosecutor Elie Honig warns that juries will increasingly turn on President Donald Trump’s prosecutors in the upcoming months.
“When I was a brand new prosecutor at the Southern District of New York, the office’s elite mob prosecutors tried John Gotti Jr. three times within a year. All three times, the jury hung,” Honig told the Intelligencer.
Three years later, federal prosecutors in Florida gave it another try, but Gotti’s defense team got the trial moved back to New York, where the jury tossed it a fourth time.
“After the trial ended, we spoke with the jurors. About half of them … thought he was guilty but objected to the serial prosecutions of the Gambino Family boss. ‘You can’t try the same guy four times. That’s just not fair,’ one juror said to me.”
“Sometimes juries just tell prosecutors to screw off,” Honig said.
Trump’s prosecutors are having their own moment with jury nullification as jurors disregard evidence and reject their cases for “political or emotional or other extraneous reasons.”
“The contagion will spread as the DOJ systematically abuses its discretion and power,” said Honig, citing the recent acquittal of D.C. Subway sandwich thrower Sean Dunn.
“This feels ridiculous to declare out loud but here goes: The sandwich thrower was obviously guilty,” said Honig. “He intentionally and angrily threw an object at a uniformed federal officer, and hit him. The problem, of course, is that the charges don’t pass what we at the SDNY used to call the straight-face test: If you can’t make the case without cracking a smile, it’s not worth bringing.”
But there was no painting the hurling of a footlong as a dangerous attack, however hard law enforcement testified that he “could feel it through his ballistic vest.”
Grand juries routinely reject federal cases involving silly or sympathetic conduct and petty accusations. One case involving verbal threats from an inebriated intellectually disabled man of course got thrown, as did a case in California where grand jurors rejected proposed indictments of anti-ICE protesters. And in Virginia, a grand jury voted down one of the proposed charges against James Comey, and barely approved the other two.
“If either the Comey or Letitia James cases reach trial, don’t be surprised if jurors engage in a bit of nullification, given the political tone of those prosecutions,” Honig said, describing the issue as being about “a loss of trust.”
“Before the current Trump administration, it was exceedingly rare for federal judges to call out the truthfulness of DOJ prosecutors,” said Honig. “… But in a string of federal cases, judges have openly chided the DOJ for its overreach, its failure to comply with at least the spirit of judicial orders, and its tendency to not quite fully tell the truth.”
“You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it in my view,” a Maryland judge told Trump’s prosectors in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.
Trump faces little opposition to his excesses, said Honig. He’s purged the Executive Branch has of objectors and the Republican-controlled House and Senate are in lockstep with him. Even the Supreme Court “generally … has gone Trump’s way on executive power.”
“One of the few remaining checks comes from the most humble of sources — the everyday civilians who get that dreaded notice in the mail and wind up serving on grand juries and trial juries,” said Honig. “As long as the Justice Department continues to play politics and undermine its own credibility, don’t expect the nullification trend to stop.”
Read the Intelligencer report at this link.
