D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge
A federal grand jury refused to indict a man who threw a sandwich at a federal officer, and grand jurors refused three times to indict a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent.
President Donald Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement on the streets of D.C. is meeting resistance in the city’s federal courthouse, where magistrate judges have admonished prosecutors for violating defendants’ rights and court rules, and grand jurors have repeatedly refused to issue indictments.
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury refused to indict a former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement agent in an incident this month that went viral on social media, according to two people with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. Prosecutors had sought to charge Sean Charles Dunn with a felony count of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.
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Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”
While judges are known to criticize prosecutors from time to time, grand jurors only in rare cases refuse to issue an indictment, which requires them to find only probable cause that a crime was committed, the lowest evidentiary bar in criminal cases. Instances of failed indictments have begun to crop up more since Trump took office this year. Grand jurors in Los Angeles have rejected indictments of people who were arrested for protesting the administration’s immigration enforcement actions, according to the Los Angeles Times.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/27/trump-crime-surge-court-cases/
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