That first meant avoiding clothing that could reveal the prospective jurors’ political affiliations.

“Do not go in there with any Free DC shirts, any Black Lives Matter, any type of paraphernalia — none of it,” Qiana Johnson, a co-founder of the prison abolitionist group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, told a small group of attendees at a Wednesday night training session in August. “You have any visible tattoos that may say ‘Free DC’ or something, cover it up.”

“You want to be Switzerland. You want to be as neutral as possible,” Johnson said, adding that they do not “want to get kicked off by either side,” referring to the prosecution and the defense.

The Washington Examiner observed the public training session hosted by Free DC and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams on Aug. 12, as part of an investigation into a network of left-wing organizations promoting jury nullification in the district. Jury nullification is the concept of jurors acquitting defendants because they feel the law was unjustly applied, even if they believe the defendants are guilty. Harriet’s Wildest Dreams hosted five such workshops last year, according to its 2025 “Impact Report.”

The investigation revealed a leftist network intent on derailing Justice Department prosecutions in Washington without crossing legal lines. Groups leading the push seek to use jury nullification, a tactic as old as the American colonies, for a radically anti-incarceration agenda. They already see Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro‘s repeated failures to secure grand jury indictments as signs of success.

“That is what Jeanine Pirro is absolutely afraid of,” Johnson said about jury nullification during the training. “That is what the lawyers in Luigi [Mangione’s] case is absolutely afraid of, because that power belongs to the people.”

For these activist trainers, the mission is to offer Washington residents a monthly opportunity to watch a nearly two-hour presentation about how to subvert a prosecution. With a turnout running anywhere between 50 attendees and the roughly nine who showed up during the Aug. 12 session, the odds are higher than typical for one of their freshly minted “super jurors” to have an impact on a case, according to organizers. Johnson boasted that night that one trainer, Ben, could not attend because he was serving jury duty. 

“You have this superpower, and that superpower is you are able to nullify that goddamn jury,” Johnson told attendees.

While they cannot predict when or whether one of their trainees will wind up on a jury, Johnson expressed some confidence that their sessions helped lead to the acquittal of Sean Dunn, the former DOJ employee who was charged with misdemeanor assault for throwing a sandwich at a law enforcement officer last summer. The jury found him not guilty in November after deliberating for around seven hours.

“I want to say, and I want to take a little bit of credit, maybe about 40%-50% of the credit for the sandwich guy,” she said, adding that she suspected “somebody along the way sat at our table and learned.”

Navigating jury selection questions

During the jury selection process, lawyers have regularly begun asking Washington residents whether they belong to abolitionist groups, organizers warned, citing what they have heard from prospective jurors. Organizers stressed that no one should lie to be placed on a jury and that no currently sworn jurors should attend their training. But they also discussed ways to answer selection questions without revealing their arrest records or activist ties.

One speaker called herself a Harriet’s Wildest Dreams volunteer, suggesting she would answer “no” to get past the activism question.

“The question as we heard it was, ‘Are you a member of an abolition organization?’ and I have not paid dues, they never gave me a card,” she told her audience.

“You may have different questions, right? But some of these are about your sort of beliefs and opinions,” the organizer said. “And your goal is to say no.”

Leaders of the training sessions notably mused about how those with past police encounters could skirt past questions about whether they had been arrested, but without technically lying.

“‘Detained’ is absolutely different because you’re not ‘arrested,’” Johnson said.

Johnson is not shy about her own record. Maryland jurors convicted her in 2015 of theft and conspiracy felonies for helping co-defendants steal houses in part through forged documents she used, according to multiple reports. She made headlines in June by winning a Democratic primary election for Prince George’s County Circuit Court clerk despite full disclosure of her criminal past.

With no Republican challenger, Johnson is set to win office in November. She denies knowingly committing crimes in the Maryland case.

“I am now the clerk of court of Prince George’s County, so I will be in there with those judges each and every day,” Johnson said amid applause from the audience. “I’ll be in there with jurors each and every day, and it’s going to make my heart so proud.”

One juror trainer portrayed rap sheets as badges of honor.

“There are many of us who are willing to be arrested for taking a small action, right? Even if it’s not a traditional crime or something like that,” the trainer said. “And so that might be a way of weeding people out. I mean, you have to tell the truth.”

Pirro vs. prison abolitionists

Pirro’s DOJ office prosecutes local and federal crimes in Washington, and under President Donald Trump, she is a leading force for more aggressive law enforcement in the district. Her office boosted prosecutions by 67% since her appointment in August 2025, she previously told the Washington Examiner.

However, she has faced difficulty getting indictments and convictions in several high-profile cases, including those of anti-Trump defendants. Last year, Washington grand jurors declined to indict two people accused of making threats to Trump’s life and two others charged with assaulting law enforcement.

Pirro suspects biased individuals have managed to infiltrate juries in her cases, she told the Washington Examiner. 

“It has become apparent to us, after speaking with jurors, once a verdict has been rendered, that those jurors who say very little or do not answer during voir dire are often doing so intentionally,” she said, using the legal French term for the selection process. “Other jurors tell us that those individuals refuse to deliberate in order to upset the verdict. Such conduct which interferes with the judicial process and undermines the fair administration of justice is deeply concerning.”

Some of Pirro’s grand jurors have also asked political questions during investigations, such as whether a case is “part of the surge” in law enforcement presence under Trump, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The think tank Just Security reported 35 Pirro cases that ended in withdrawals or dismissals by July 20. That figure preceded her recent decision to drop charges in four separate Reflecting Pool vandalism cases, including the prosecution against David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist.

And there have been at least nine reported refusals by grand juries to bring charges across seven different cases, including the “Seditious Six” case against Democratic lawmakers accused of telling soldiers to disobey Trump. However, at least two in that group involved the cases of Paul Bryant and Edward Dana, both of whom did not receive federal grand jury indictments but were later tried in D.C. Superior Court. Both were convicted on misdemeanor simple assault charges.

Free DC and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams boasted that Washington jurors were using their “power” to halt prosecutions in a September 2025 Instagram post.

“Jurors in D.C. are pushing back, showing that we do not have to rubber stamp prosecutions that target and criminalize our communities and disrupt systemic bias from inside the courtroom,” the post reads, encouraging viewers to attend their juror trainings.

The groups pushing the agenda make up an overlapping network: Johnson is a Harriet’s Wildest Dreams board member, but Free DC also credits her with having “poured” effort into the group on its website and features her in its social media messaging. Additionally, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams Executive Director “Nee Nee” Taylor is also a former organizer with Black Lives Matter DC, where Johnson once held a similar role. Keya Chatterjee, meanwhile, is Free DC’s executive director and a Freedom Trainers co-founder.

Johnson also told training attendees to follow the Louisiana-based nonprofit group Juror Project, of which she is a board member. Harriet’s Wildest Dreams’s 2025 impact report quoted the Juror Project as saying their partnership “has brought the power of jury service and jury nullification to the Washington DC community.”

The Juror Project’s animus toward police is also blatant, with another board member naming his dog after the late police-killing fugitive Assata Shakur. The nonprofit group did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.

Free DC and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams did not respond to requests for comment on how they distinguish their guidance from encouraging prospective jurors to conceal relevant information during jury selection, what safeguards they use to prevent trainees from crossing legal boundaries, and what measures they take if they learn anyone attending their trainings is seated on a jury or has been summoned for selection.

Can they get away with it?

Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, said merely attending a jury nullification workshop would not necessarily disqualify someone from serving on a future jury.

However, a prospective juror who may have attended one of such sessions could cross a legal line during selection by lying about potential biases or activist affiliations or by deliberately withholding information needed by the judge and attorneys to evaluate whether the person could decide the case impartially.

“There’s a difference between saying, ‘Don’t lie,’ versus, ‘Don’t tell everything,’” Blackman told the Washington Examiner. “That would also be a problem.”

Blackman said prosecutors could ask workshop attendees additional questions about whether they would follow the judge’s instructions and decide guilt or innocence based on the evidence. Attendance at a training session alone, however, would probably not justify removing a juror and could raise First Amendment concerns if it became the sole basis for a strike, the professor said.

On rare occasions, prosecutors have convicted people in the United States of trying to illegally influence juries by sharing nullification materials near courthouses. The convictions are often challenged or overturned in court on free speech grounds.

However, officials have taken down activists’ juror training flyers near the D.C. Superior Court building after Pirro’s office complained, a source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner.

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Ultimately, Washington’s criminal justice advocates portray freeing certain guilty defendants as their civic duty.

“That is one of the very few powers that the government has not figured out how to take from the system yet,” Johnson said at the Aug. 12 training. “And if we keep going the way that we’re going, they’re probably going to try to figure out a way to do it. But as of right now, we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing.”