A jury pool that decides guilt by zip code isn’t dispensing justice. It’s picking a side. That’s the problem Washington’s U.S. Attorney’s Office faces right now, and it’s bigger than one sandwich.
Sean Dunn threw a sub sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer in August 2025. It’s on video. He confessed at the scene: “I did it. I threw the sandwich.” A federal grand jury still refused to indict him on the felony charge. Prosecutors dropped it to a misdemeanor, and a trial jury last November acquitted him anyway. Jurors dismissed from that same panel told CNN they doubted any D.C. jury would convict him, sandwich or no sandwich.
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I’ve spent a decade as a designated expert witness on fiduciary duty and investment management, testifying in federal and state courts, sitting through jury selection, watching panels weighing evidence they’d rather not weigh. In voir dire, you learn fast that a juror’s answers to the standard fairness questions and a juror’s actual disposition toward the parties in the room are two different things. Lawyers on both sides account for that with peremptory strikes and follow-up questions. Jurors bring their politics into the box whether we like it or not. That’s not new. What’s new is that in Washington, someone is now coaching them on how to hide it long enough to get seated.
The numbers back up what those dismissed jurors said. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office won only half of its first eight criminal trials this year, far below the roughly 90% conviction rate federal prosecutors post nationally. Grand juries have refused indictments in at least four cases in a single week, including one involving a woman accused of threatening the president. Pirro called that outcome the essence of a politicized jury. She’s not wrong.
Some of this is organic distrust of federal power, and conservatives should be honest about that half of the ledger. The grand jury exists as a check on prosecutorial overreach, and Antonin Scalia defended that function precisely because it puts citizens between the government and the accused. Jonathan Turley has made the same point for years: a grand jury that never says no isn’t a check, it’s a formality. A separate D.C. grand jury declined three times to indict a man over what amounted to scratches on a federal agent’s knuckle. Weak facts deserve a no-bill. That’s the system working the way James Madison intended.
But what’s happening in D.C. isn’t citizens quietly exercising conscience. It’s coordinated. The Washington Examiner’s own reporting found a group called Freedom Trainers, backed by a George Soros-linked nonprofit network that has pulled in roughly $40 million since 2020, running sessions that teach activists how to land on federal juries and vote not guilty “for any reason,” while telling them to conceal that intention during selection. Call it what it is: jury tampering with a pamphlet and a fiscal sponsor, dressed up as conscience.
Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) has introduced legislation to strip federal funding from groups that promote this and has secured a House appropriations amendment ordering the judiciary to study it. That’s a start, not a fix. Congress can also look at venue — federal cases arising from federal law enforcement actions in the district don’t have to be tried exclusively by a district jury pool that self-selects for hostility to the government bringing the case. Change of venue is an old, boring, constitutional tool, and boring tools work.
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None of this means every prosecution out of Pirro’s office was well-charged. A sandwich isn’t a felony, and prosecutors who reach for maximum charges on minor conduct hand nullification advocates their best argument. Discipline has to run in both directions: charge what the facts support, and let jurors decide the facts, not the politics.
But a justice system where verdicts turn on a defendant’s ideology instead of the elements of the crime isn’t justice. It’s tribalism wearing a robe. Washington’s jury pool has a credibility problem, and increasingly, so does an activist network working to make that problem permanent.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
