Jeanine Pirro’s Cases Keep Falling Apart, And The Judges Have Had Enough

Paul Nguyen faced up to eight years in prison for allegedly assaulting a Department of Homeland Security agent during President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of policing in Washington, D.C.

But like so many other felony assault cases recently brought by Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host turned U.S. attorney for D.C., the charge against Nguyen crumbled in less than a month.

A prosecutor from Pirro’s office told a magistrate judge on Tuesday that the office no longer plans to pursue any charges “based on current evidence,” a strong indication that, after reviewing body cam footage and any witness statements, it doesn’t believe it has a case. Nguyen had been accused of injuring the DHS agent during an early-morning scuffle along one of the city’s nightlife strips.

The Maryland resident said he won’t forget the four nights he spent in D.C. Jail, all for a charge that would soon be dropped.

“It was the scariest experience of my life,” Nguyen said, noting the facility’s well-documented cockroach and rodent problem.

Plenty of recent defendants in D.C.’s U.S. District Court can relate to Nguyen’s case.

Pirro’s office has brought a slew of charges accusing people of assaulting federal officers or threatening the president, only to have the cases go nowhere as felonies. Meanwhile, defendants have spent days in jail, feared years in prison and seen their names in the news — all, it seems to defense attorneys, in the service of promoting Trump’s crackdown politically.

In several instances, grand juries have “no billed” the cases, or declined to return indictments — a highly unusual occurrence, since prosecutors largely control the grand jury process. But in other cases, prosecutors have simply downgraded the charge to a misdemeanor or dropped it entirely, seemingly without a grand jury’s rejection. Defense attorneys say the initial felony charges led to needless jail time and worry.

The district court’s magistrate judges appear to be losing patience.

Matthew J. Sharbaugh, who dismissed Nguyen’s case, asked the prosecutor in Tuesday’s hearing if he knew how many cases Pirro’s office had charged in the past month and then sought to dismiss after further reflection, often the night before the defendant was due in court.

“Would it surprise you to hear it’s 11?” Sharbaugh asked, explaining such cases had become so frequent that he had clerks compile them.

Just an hour before the Nguyen hearing, Sharbaugh had dismissed another alleged assault case in similar circumstances. Prosecutors had accused a D.C. man of spitting on two National Guard members while he passed by them on a scooter near Union Station, but asked the court to dismiss the felony charge “after reviewing the evidence.” The man now faces a less serious misdemeanor charge in city court instead.

Sharbaugh said it seemed as though Pirro’s office is doing things backward: “filing these charges and investigating them after they’re filed.”

“I have to say, this is becoming a real concern,” he chided the prosecutor.

A different magistrate judge has lambasted Pirro’s office at least twice in recent weeks over similar shaky cases.

Asked to respond to Sharbaugh’s concerns, a spokesperson for Pirro defended her prosecutions during the D.C. law enforcement surge.

“U.S. Attorney Pirro and her office, in charging over 1,700 cases, follow the evidence wherever it leads, constantly evaluating each case as it develops to rigorously follow the law and to bring swift justice — including a dismissal when it is in the interest of justice,” the spokesperson, Tim Lauer, said in an email.

A Washington Post analysis of 1,273 arrests during Trump’s D.C. takeover found that one-third of them involved federal agents, as opposed to just local cops with the Metropolitan Police Department. Illegal gun possession was the most common charge, though 1 in 8 cases revolved around minor alleged crimes, like transit fare evasion or smoking marijuana in public.

“Many of the arrests started the same way: a group of officers from several law enforcement agencies approaching suspects for nonviolent offenses,” the Post reported.

Trump’s assertion of federal control over D.C. law enforcement expired a week ago, but he has threatened to renew it if the city doesn’t cooperate with immigration enforcement. Even if there are fewer DHS and FBI agents enlisted in local crime-fighting efforts moving forward, Pirro will still be leading the office that prosecutes most of the city’s serious crimes.

It seems not all prosecutors are on board with her aggressive charging strategy. In the past week, HuffPost sat in on two hearings where prosecutors made a point of informing the judge that they had just inherited the case because a colleague left the office. (Whether they quit or were fired wasn’t noted.) In both cases, the government was seeking to have the felony charges dismissed.

Legal experts said overcharging can be severely damaging — not just to the defendants who sit in jail awaiting a hearing but to the broader community and the faith it needs to put in the criminal justice system.

Randall Eliason, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law and a former prosecutor, said pursuing inappropriate charges is “deeply unfair” to defendants and a waste of the court’s time. He said a key part of the job is “exercising prosecutorial discretion” and deciding which charges, if any, are deserved.

In his 12 years as a prosecutor in D.C., Eliason said he never had a grand jury return a “no bill.”

“Routinely charging felonies even in trivial cases just because you want to look tough means you are failing to exercise that discretion properly and are not doing your job,” Eliason said in an email.

He added that Pirro risks “undermining her office’s credibility” by trying to juice the numbers and make Trump’s D.C. takeover look effective.

“If it appears prosecutors are just automatically charging felonies without regard to the facts, then juries are understandably going to be more skeptical of prosecutors even in cases where felony charges might be completely appropriate,” he said.

Pirro’s most conspicuous cases aren’t likely to inspire the public’s confidence.

In one, three separate grand juries declined to indict a D.C. woman accused of shoving an FBI agent during an altercation with immigration officers. In another, a grand jury refrained from indicting the D.C. “sandwich guy” who allegedly struck a Customs and Border Protection officer with a hoagie. Both defendants face misdemeanor charges instead.

Paul Butler, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a former prosecutor, said the sandwich toss had the makings of a misdemeanor case all along.

“To prove [the felony], the prosecutors would have to demonstrate that he intended or attempted to inflict death or serious bodily injury,” Butler said. “Look at the viral video and see how that could have resulted in death or serious bodily injury. It’s overcharging, and the jurors may have just thought the evidence didn’t fit the crime.”

Back in the 1990s, Butler studied the concept of “jury nullification” — that is, jurors blocking what they see as unfair prosecutions — specifically in D.C. drug possession cases. Like at the height of the drug war, he said, prosecutors now run the risk of “losing the confidence of the community” under Pirro’s hard-line tactics.

“When they throw the book at people for minor crimes, it kind of maps onto this sense that a lot of people in the Black community have that prosecutors are out to lock up everybody they can,” he said. “That the interest isn’t so much public safety as it is putting people in prison.”

The city’s defense attorneys have been overwhelmed by a surge in charges during Trump’s takeover, according to Todd Baldwin, president of the trial lawyers’ association at D.C. Superior Court, where local, non-federal crimes are prosecuted. He said his typical load of 35 or 40 cases ballooned to about 75. The arraignments on Mondays — when those locked up over the weekend make their initial court appearance — have stretched past midnight at times.

Baldwin said many low-level drug cases that previously would have been turned down are now being prosecuted. On an afternoon last week, HuffPost witnessed a man being arraigned for possession of hashish.

“Everything is getting prosecuted, even the smallest cases,” Baldwin said while on a break from his hearings.

“Is it to swamp defense attorneys? Is it to swamp the courts? That’s what worries me,” he said.

The strain on court resources also worries Sharbaugh, the magistrate judge at the district court. In Nguyen’s hearing on Tuesday, he said the court’s staff was being stretched thin by cases being filed then dropped.

“There is a sense of frustration among those of us here,” the judge said.

Although Nguyen’s case was dismissed, it was done “without prejudice” — meaning Pirro’s office is trying to reserve the right to bring a case against him again in the future. That has been a common theme in the charges dropped against several defendants in recent weeks. Their defense attorneys, including Nguyen’s, have argued they don’t deserve to have the possibility of future felony prosecutions hanging over their heads.

Regardless, Nguyen’s time in court might not be over: He said he’s likely to file a civil lawsuit over his arrest. He appeared before Sharbaugh in an arm sling due to an injury he says was caused by the cops. Outside the courtroom, he said he missed several work meetings due to his lockup, as well as the anniversary of his father’s death. He said it was his only jail stay and vowed it would be his last.

“I have PTSD like crazy,” he said.