In a year marked by dramatic escalations and deepening political divides, the usually invisible machinery of American justice has ground to a halt in a most unexpected place: the grand jury room. Over the past month, grand juries in Washington, D.C. have repeatedly refused to indict defendants in high-profile cases, upending the expectations of prosecutors and shining a spotlight on the delicate balance between government power and citizen oversight.
It’s an extraordinary development, legal experts agree. According to NPR, grand juries in D.C. have declined to indict at least seven times in the weeks leading up to September 5, 2025—a number that longtime prosecutors say is virtually unheard of. In a system where, as Georgetown Law professor Paul Butler told McClatchy News, "getting an indictment is like a spa day for prosecutors," the string of refusals has stunned observers and rattled the Department of Justice.
At the heart of the controversy is the Trump administration’s aggressive response to what it has described as a crime emergency in the nation’s capital. In August 2025, President Trump declared a federal crime emergency, deploying 2,200 National Guard troops and federal law enforcement agents to supplement Washington’s 3,100-member police force. The stated aim: to crack down on rising crime and assist with immigration enforcement. But as NPR and other outlets report, the surge of federal muscle has been met with skepticism—and, increasingly, resistance—from the city’s grand juries.
The list of cases where grand juries have refused to indict reads like a roll call of recent headlines. On July 22, 2025, Sydney Lori Reid was accused of assaulting an FBI agent while intervening during an ICE operation in D.C. Prosecutors presented her case to three different grand juries, all of which refused to indict her on felony charges, according to McClatchy News. On August 10, Sean Charles Dunn, a former Justice Department employee, allegedly threw a sandwich at a Border Patrol officer—a case that quickly went viral online. Despite prosecutors seeking an eight-year felony sentence, a federal grand jury on August 27 refused to indict Dunn, leading the government to downgrade the charges to a misdemeanor.
Other recent no-bills include the case of Alvin Summers, accused of attacking a U.S. Park Police officer on August 15, and Edward Dana, charged with making threats against President Trump and law enforcement on August 17. Both men walked away without felony indictments after grand juries declined to charge them. Even in cases involving alleged threats against the President—traditionally a near-certain path to indictment—grand juries have balked, as in the cases of Edward Dana and Nathalie Rose Jones, the latter of whom was not indicted for online threats against Trump on September 3.
For prosecutors, the refusals have been nothing short of humiliating. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host, has publicly denounced the grand jurors’ decisions, calling them “the essence of a politicized jury,” according to WUSA-TV. In a statement to NPR, Pirro declared, “the system here is broken on many levels,” blaming what she sees as juries refusing to abide by their oath and follow the law—especially in politically sensitive cases.
But many legal experts see things differently. Paul Butler, the Georgetown Law professor and former federal prosecutor, argues that the failures reflect not politicized juries but weak evidence and overzealous charging. “It’s clear that Subway guy was overcharged,” Butler said, referring to Dunn. “It’s clear that Reid was overcharged.” Butler points out that to secure a felony assault indictment against Dunn, prosecutors would have had to prove he intended or attempted to cause serious bodily injury with a sandwich—a stretch, to say the least. “That crime requires that the prosecutor prove an intent to kill or seriously harm from a sandwich being thrown at you. Come on,” Butler told NPR.
Mary Graw Leary, a law professor at the Catholic University of America and former federal prosecutor, echoed Butler’s assessment, telling McClatchy News that the repeated failures to indict in these D.C. cases are “remarkable” and likely reflect the evidence more than anything else. “To me that speaks much more to the evidence than to anything else,” she said, adding that the bar for indictment—probable cause—is “extraordinarily low.” In 2010, for instance, out of about 162,000 cases prosecuted in federal courts, grand juries did not indict just 11 defendants, according to a FiveThirtyEight report cited by McClatchy News.
Some observers point to broader issues within the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. Leary suggested that the firings of seasoned prosecutors may have contributed to the string of failed indictments. “When you get rid of your most seasoned prosecutors, this might be what happens, right?” she said. “You don’t get people who really know how to effectively manage cases of violence against law enforcement and see the distinctions between an actual threat to a law enforcement officer and something that is less than that.”
Others see the grand jury refusals as a form of jury nullification—a rarely exercised power where jurors decline to indict or convict, even if the law technically supports it, because they disagree with its application or fairness. According to legal analyst James D. Zirin, writing for Nexstar Media, jury nullification serves as a vital check on government overreach, allowing ordinary citizens to inject the “conscience of the community” into the accusatory process. “Jury nullification is an important check on government abuse of power,” Zirin wrote, noting that such actions have a long history in American justice, from the pre-Civil War acquittals of abolitionists to modern-day protest cases.
The phenomenon has not gone unnoticed on the streets of Washington. As NPR reported, Sean Dunn has become a folk hero of sorts, with posters of him throwing his now-infamous sandwich cropping up around the city. For some, like Ashley, who has lived in D.C. for more than eight years, the image is a reminder that “small acts of rebellion can help.” Yet not everyone is so enthusiastic. Jackie, a 60-year resident, told NPR she opposes the National Guard’s presence but doesn’t believe police deserve to be mistreated. “Say what you want to say about them, but I don’t think we should mistreat them,” she said.
Behind the headlines, the grand jury system itself is under renewed scrutiny. As Robert Cindrich, a retired federal judge, told NPR, grand juries operate in secret, with only the prosecutor present and no defense counsel allowed. The evidentiary threshold—probable cause—is the lowest in the legal system, and yet, as former D.C. prosecutor Kevin Flynn observed, these no-bills represent a failure of prosecutorial discretion. Flynn, who spent 35 years in the office, told NPR that such rejections are almost unheard of, and that the current policy of “papering” every police case—charging every possible offense—was “prima facie asinine.”
In a time of heightened political tension and public distrust, the grand jury refusals in D.C. have become a rare, if imperfect, check on executive power. Whether they reflect weak cases, prosecutorial missteps, or a deeper sense of civic resistance, they are a reminder that, as Judge Cindrich put it, “the citizen, in the end, in the American system of justice, is the final arbiter.”
