Man Charged With Shining Laser Pointer At Trump’s Helicopter Acquitted In 35 Minutes

A man who was charged with a felony for allegedly shining a laser beam at Marine One while it carried President Donald Trump was found not guilty by a Washington, D.C., jury in less than an hour on Tuesday.

The acquittal of Jacob Winkler marks yet another embarrassing setback for Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who’s struggled to make an example out of people her office claims assaulted federal agents or threatened the president.

Winkler, 33, was arrested in September when a U.S. Secret Service agent allegedly saw him shine the red beam at the low-flying helicopter shortly after it departed from the White House grounds. The felony charge for pointing a laser at an aircraft carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.

At the time, Pirro, a former Fox News personality, promised to prosecute Winkler “to the fullest extent of the law.”

After his trial wrapped earlier this week, the jury deliberated for just 35 minutes before finding Winkler not guilty, according to his public defenders, Alexis Gardner and Ubong Akpan.

Gardner and Akpan told HuffPost in a statement that the verdict exposed “a disturbing reality: In the most powerful city in the world, the federal government spent scarce resources to make a felon out of a homeless man with nothing but a cat toy keychain.”

“Every hour spent on this case was an hour not spent addressing real threats to our community,” they said. “We need to stop policing poverty and start investing in dignity.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment on the case on Friday.

After Trump declared a crime emergency and deployed the National Guard in D.C. last summer, Pirro brought a slew of charges to federal court alleging residents assaulted federal agents or threatened Trump. At the time, officers from agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were swarming the city on neighborhood patrols.

The barrage of cases seemed designed to hype Trump’s urban crime crackdown and make Pirro’s office look tough, but many of them quickly crumbled or resulted in acquittals after sucking up court resources and causing defendants mental anguish and jail time.

In some cases, prosecutors even failed to clear the famously low bar of getting a grand jury to return an indictment. That includes a case in which Pirro’s office charged a D.C. man with threatening to kill Trump after he was arrested for damaging a light fixture outside a restaurant; affidavits suggested the man was drunk and speaking nonsense while in police custody.

One defense attorney told HuffPost such cases were “horseshit” and served no purpose other than to boost numbers for Pirro’s office and make crime in D.C. look worse than it really is.

In the most high-profile case, a D.C. man was charged with assaulting a U.S. Border Patrol agent after hitting him in the chest with a turkey sandwich from Subway. A grand jury declined to return a felony indictment in the case, so Pirro’s office pursued a misdemeanor assault charge against him. A D.C. jury found him not guilty as well.