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juries
Jury Duty: Ordinary Heroes Use a Building Block of Democracy to Fight Trump
In cases like that of “Sandwich Guy,” it’s the jury system, with eight centuries of tradition behind it, that has given the American people a last-chance outlet to say “no” to fascism.
Sep 04, 2025
It’s a well-worn cliche in the legal world that prosecutors have so much clout in the grand jury room that they could indict a ham sandwich. The currency of this quote only soared in value when the man who first uttered it, a New York State top judge named Sol Wachtler, was subsequently indicted himself.
And maybe the US Justice Department still could indict a ham sandwich. But a salami hoagie from Subway is apparently a bridge too far.
I am talking, of course, about the now notorious Washington, DC case against the man commonly known as “Sandwich Guy”—a now-former Justice Department paralegal (yes, the irony) named Sean Dunn whose anger at the federal surge of law-enforcement officers backed by National Guard troops in the nation’s capital boiled over last month. Dunn verbally quarreled with agents and called them “fascists” before hurling that infamous hoagie at a Customs and Border Protection officer and then getting chased down, with all of it captured on video.
To many in DC and around the country who think the Trump regime’s ostensibly crime-fighting military operation in Washington is a dictatorial overreach, “Sandwich Guy” quickly became a resistance icon, his action celebrated in pop-up posters plastered around Washington like the one at the top of this newsletter.
To Trump’s Justice Department, Dunn’s sub attack and its disrespect for the authority of an authoritarian regime demanded the full hammer of the law. Federal prosecutors went before the DC grand jury seeking a felony indictment against their ex-coworker—a stiff penalty for an attack with a soft roll.
But then something remarkable—or it least it used to be remarkable before January or so—took place. The DC grand jury returned “no bill,” meaning that a majority of the panel (typically between 16 and 23 people) who listened to the Justice Department’s case against Dunn voted against indicting him. Prosecutors later conceded the defeat and said they are instead charging Dunn with a misdemeanor.
We don’t know why the grand jurors rejected a felony charge against Dunn, but we do know that this kind of stand by a grand jury wasn’t an isolated incident. Days earlier, the Justice Department had sought felony charges against a DC woman named Sidney Lori Reid, accused with interfering with federal agents’ arrest of two alleged gang members. Prosecutors claimed Reid, while filming the bust, got in the way of agents and then fought back aggressively when an immigration agent pushed her against a wall, and that an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent suffered a hand bruise in the ensuing scuffle.
In this case, prosecutors tried not once but three separate times to secure a felony indictment of Reid—each time rebuffed by the grand jury—before finally settling on a misdemeanor charge instead. “The US attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word,” Reid’s two lawyers said in a statement.
We should be inspired by these grand jurors in DC and Los Angeles to get more creative in our own daily lives in resisting American autocracy.
OK, you can blame the “woke,” left-leaning citizens of DC—US President Donald Trump got just 6.5% of the vote there in 2024—except that something similar reportedly happened some 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles earlier this year. There, the US Attorney’s office initially sought felony charges against 38 people related to unrest over stepped-up federal immigration raids, but the Los Angeles Times reported that only seven of the criminal complaints resulted in indictments, with the rest ending in dismissals or misdemeanors. The paper said the US attorney, Bill Essayli, was caught screaming at his subordinates after one felony case collapsed.
To borrow what Stephen Stills wrote after youth riots on LA’s Sunset Strip in 1966, there’s something happening here...
But what it is, ain’t exactly clear. Grand jury proceedings are secret—so much so that even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the height of their Watergate glory days struggled to lift that veil. In some of these cases, it’s possible—perhaps likely, given the inflated nature of some of the government’s allegations—that the jurors simply felt that the feds lacked evidence to make their case.
Or, it’s also possible that these everyday citizens engaged in a highly unique form of protest that a law professor might call “jury nullification.” This is essentially when a jury elects to clear a defendant not because of a lack of evidence that they did what the government accused them of doing, but because they believed the underlying law is unjust, or that the entire system is thoroughly corrupted.
As Paul Butler, Georgetown University law professor and now frequent MSNBC commentator, argued in a 2016 Washington Post op-ed, the notion of a jury nullification in America carries a rich history that includes the American Revolution, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the movement for LGBTQ rights. Citing aggressive prosecutions of Black Americans for minor offenses, Butler wrote then: “I encourage any juror who thinks the police or prosecutors have crossed the line in a particular case to refuse to convict.”
Nine years later, in jurisdictions that voted heavily against Trump in 2024—and which face armed troops and masked, unbadged federal agents in 2025—jurors seems to be engaged in a quiet, behind-closed-doors revolution against the regime.
Think about this. The right to justice by a jury of your peers—everyday citizens from your own community—is in essence the foundational building block of what over centuries would slowly become democracy. Britain’s Magna Carta—written in 1215 (!)—codified this notion as a defense against its overbearing lords more than 800 years ago, and the idea proved so powerful it has managed to survive the creation of our large institutions that provide Big Government but too often seem removed from the people.
The Trump regime’s push for an authoritarian United States might be the biggest story right now, but rivaling that is the growing gap between our cowardly and failing big institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court, Big Media, university administrations, etc., etc.—and the wisdom of regular folks.
For sure, there’s an unshakable cult of Trump supporters, but one of the many underreported stories of 2025 is the lingering faith in democratic ideals, fairness, equity, and diversity that still holds with the majority of the American people—despite everything that’s happened. We’ve seen it in Trump’s sky-high disapproval rating, and the public rejection of individual policies, and in protests like June’s “No Kings” event that brought a record-setting 5 million folks into the streets.
Yet feckless opposition from Beltway Democrats and an increasingly compromised news media also has the masses realizing they are on their own, still in search of workable outlets to challenge an increasingly repressive regime. Protests can be ignored or put down, while economic boycotts are promising but hard to organize. It’s the jury system, with eight centuries of tradition behind it, that has given the American people a last-chance outlet to say “no” to fascism.
We should be inspired by these grand jurors in DC and Los Angeles to get more creative in our own daily lives in resisting American autocracy. That would be a modern-day miracle, turning a loaf and some salami slices into a feast of democratic resistance.
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Groups Say Trump Trial Juries Must Be Protected From Right-Wing Threats
"Self-serving assaults on institutions and individuals are what Trump and his enablers do."
Oct 02, 2023
As former U.S. President Donald Trumpappeared in New York Supreme Court on Monday for the beginning of a civil fraud trial, over 30 advocacy organizations released a letter stressing the need to protect juries in his four ongoing criminal cases.
Trump faces a total of 91 felony charges: four in the federal 2020 election case; 40 in the federal classified documents case; 34 in the New York case that stems from alleged hush money payments during the 2016 cycle; and 13 in the Georgia election case.
"Jurors—past, present, and future—are under attack from Donald Trump and those who do his bidding," states the groups' letter, which came just hours after the 2024 Republican front-runner's social media tirade about the civil case that will be decided by a judge.
"Self-serving assaults on institutions and individuals are what Trump and his enablers do," the letter argues. "These attacks threaten centuries-old American institutions designed by the Framers to hold to account any leader who would be king."
The letter highlights that in early August, after a Washington, D.C. grand jury indicted Trump, he wrote on social media, "If you go after me, I will come after you."
A few days later, he said, "No way I can get a fair trial, or even close to a fair trial, in Washington, D.C." The letter says that "it's hard to miss the import of this message in a jurisdiction that draws its jury pool from a population of which 45% are Black Americans."
As
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—which exclusively reported on the new letter—noted:
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has sought increased protections after Trump supporters posted personal details about the grand jury that indicted the former president, leading to angry threats and harassment.
And Willis, herself, said she's been targeted by threats and racial slurs, forcing her to take steps to protect her daughters, father, and ex-husband.
Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee recently banned reporters and the public from identifying jurors in the trial against Trump and 18 co-defendants or disclosing other personal details about them. He also required lawyers to refer to them only as their numbers in court.
In addition to detailing examples of the ex-president and his allies' recent attacks on juries, the letter points out that Trump claimed the 2016 and 2020 elections would be "rigged" against him, and after his loss last cycle, he spread the "Big Lie" that he won and "successfully eroded faith in democracy and elections among his followers."
"Trump is now deploying the same, pre-judgment playbook upon the jurors and system of justice positioned to decide his fate in criminal court," asserts the letter. "His attacks are designed to eviscerate an institution of justice inherited from English law and in existence in America before the Constitution that enshrined it. Juries protect individual freedom."
"Trump, by undermining institutions that check both government power and lawless individuals, aims to release himself from all constraints. For this reason, his vicious attacks on juries are sure to escalate," the letter warns, concluding with a call for all "who believe in the rule of law and the jury system" to "speak up and defend such institutions under attack."
The letter was organized by the Not Above the Law coalition. Signatories include Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Government Accountability Project, Indivisible, People for the American Way, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, and Stand Up America.
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Throughout the Country, Potential Black Jurors Face High Rejection Rates
In Louisiana's Caddo Parish, attorneys rejected 46 percent of potential black jurors on arbitrary grounds, a trend which is reflected in nationwide statistics
Aug 17, 2015
In hundreds of trials over 10 years, prosecutors in a Louisiana county rejected potential black jurors three times as often as they rejected potential jurors of other races--a trend which is reflected in court systems around the country, new reporting published Monday has found.
Blackstrikes: A Study of the Racially Disparate Use of Peremptory Challenges by the Caddo Parish District Attorney's Office (pdf), published by Reprieve Australia, analyzed 332 trials between 2003 and 2012.
While the report focuses on one region of Louisiana, additional research by the New York Times connects those statistics to others from nationwide courts.
In the U.S., peremptory challenges allow attorneys to reject jurors without giving a reason. However, if those dismissals are disputed based on race or gender, prosecutors must give a "neutral" excuse for the decision. According to the Times, such reasons include having long hair, wearing a beard, living in a low-income neighborhood, failing to meet eye contact, having a hyphenated last name, or displaying bad posture, among others. In Caddo, the study found that prosecutors rejected 46 percent of potential black jurors on peremptory grounds.
"Not one defendant was acquitted in a trial where there were two or fewer black jurors," writes Ursula Noye, vice president of Reprieve Australia and the study's author. "The acquittal rate in the 49 trials where the number of black jurors was three or more was 12 [percent]. In trials with five or more black jurors, defendants are acquitted 19 [percent] of the time."
Out of 8,318 potential jurors analyzed during those 10 years, only 35 percent were black--though Caddo's population is 48 percent black. The reasons for that discrepancy, according to Northwestern University School of Law professor Shari Diamond, could themselves be influenced by other racially skewed elements of the American justice system.
Diamond told the Times that "[b]lacks may be less likely to be on jury lists drawn from voter registration records, less likely to appear when called, more likely to qualify for hardship exemptions and more likely to be disqualified for felony convictions."
However, of those 35 percent, prosecutors rejected nearly half through peremptory challenges, while only 15 percent of other potential jurors were rejected on similar grounds.
According to the report:
A statistical analysis of this disparity shows that the difference is significant. Some individual prosecutors struck black prospective jurors at rates of 4.5 and 5 times the rate they struck those who are not black.
While a disparity in the rate of strikes between prospective jurors who are black and not black may be subject to innocent explanation, the consistently high blackstrikes rate across 332 trials over ten years indicates otherwise. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the pattern disclosed in this study strongly suggests that race has played a role in the exercise of peremptory challenges by the Caddo Parish District Attorney's office.
As part of the national trend, the Times reports:
[I]n Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina...prosecutors struck black jurors at double or triple the rates of others.
In Georgia, prosecutors excluded every black prospective juror in a death penalty case against a black defendant, which the Supreme Court has agreed to review this fall.
"If you repeatedly see all-white juries convict African-Americans, what does that do to public confidence in the criminal justice system?" asked Elisabeth A. Semel, the director of the death penalty clinic at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
In a 1987 death penalty case in Georgia, a 34-year-old black woman was excluded from the jury for being too close in age to the defendant, a 19-year-old black man. However, the prosecutors did not challenge the eight potential white jurors who were 35 or younger.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear Foster v. Chatman later this year. The Times writes that the Court's decision may change the jury selection process.
Recent human rights protests around the country have highlighted deep-seated institutional racism in the American judicial system, such as the New York Police Department's racial profiling policies, the criminalization of poverty found in Ferguson, Missouri, or decades of off-the-books torture carried out against majority-black detainees on secret sites in Chicago. However, Noye's report exposes the extent those systems can reach. "Next to voting," she told the Times, serving on a jury is "perhaps the most important civil right."
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