The House committee overseeing local D.C. affairs has launched an investigation into “politicized jury nullification initiatives by left-wing activist groups,” Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) announced Tuesday.
The investigation is so far targeting two D.C. organizations, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams and Free DC, which have hosted a series of trainings called the Juror Information Project. Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, alleges the groups are advocating for the long-debated practice of jury nullification, which happens when a juror opts to acquit someone — even if they think the accused person is technically guilty — because they object to the law or to the decision by prosecutors to charge the person.
Comer argues that the groups are undermining the rule of law.
“It is clear that the position of Free DC and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams is that potential jurors should not make decisions impartially based on applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case, but based on their subjective, personal beliefs and activist agendas,” he said in a news release Tuesday. “These shocking reports underscore the necessity of congressional oversight to protect against an assault targeting constitutional rights and processes.”
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Comer’s office said it sent letters to two people associated with the groups. The Free DC co-founder named in Comer’s letter did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The Harriet’s Wildest Dreams co-founder named in Comer’s letter declined to comment.
Discourse around jury nullification in D.C. took on steam last year after a streak of cases where D.C. grand juries declined to indict people who had been arrested for allegedly assaulting federal officers. Grand juries almost always return indictments, and not doing so is exceedingly rare; the process is generally stacked in prosecutors’ favor. But the office of the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, was asking grand juries for the indictments in the midst of a surge of federal law enforcement that has been deeply unpopular among D.C. residents.
Perhaps the most high-profile of those cases involved the so-called “sandwich guy,” who became a symbol of D.C.’s anti-Trump resistance after he hurled a sandwich at a federal agent in a self-described act of protest. Pirro’s office pursued him for felony assault, but a grand jury declined to indict on that charge. Then, prosecutors downgraded the charge to a misdemeanor, and another D.C. jury found the defendant not guilty after a trial. To find the “sandwich guy” guilty, the jury would have had to find that he generated a “reasonable apprehension of immediate bodily harm”; the defense argued that throwing a sandwich was harmless.
The string of incidents raised questions about whether jurors were declining to indict because they believed prosecutors had not presented enough evidence to establish probable cause, or because they disagreed with the decision to pursue charges in the first place. Without getting inside jurors’ heads, it’s impossible to know.
Jury nullification has long been a subject of debate among attorneys and legal scholars. Georgetown University law professor Paul Butler, in a Washington Post op-ed last year, called it “a powerful tool for slapping down politicized criminal justice” and said D.C. grand jurors were being patriotic when they rejected the charges Pirro’s office sought. The prominent libertarian group the Cato Institute has also supported the practice as a safeguard against government overreach. But critics of the practice argue that the legal system relies on jurors applying the facts to the law, not voting their conscience.
According to their public websites and social media posts, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams and Free DC’s workshops have discussed “what it really means to serve on a jury and how we can use that role to protect our people especially those with marginalized identities who are disproportionately targeted by the criminal legal system.”
“Jury duty is not just a civic responsibility; it’s a powerful tool for ensuring fairness and justice,” the groups wrote in a description of a September Juror Information Project session. “Come and engage in meaningful conversations, learn from legal experts, activists, and fellow community members, and find out how you can play a pivotal role in shaping a more just society.”
While the September event description did not explicitly mention jury nullification, the Washington Examiner reported in August that a leader at one of the sessions had spoken directly about the idea, saying: “You have this superpower, and that superpower is you are able to nullify that goddamn jury.” That quote made its way into Comer’s letters.
Comer’s office, in the letters, requested documents related to juror training and information about how the events have been financed, giving the groups a deadline of Oct. 27.
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