A former Olympian charged with deliberately damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is seeking access to all of the closed-door testimony that led to his indictment, pointing to “irregularities” in those grand jury proceedings.
In a court filing Monday, David Hearn’s attorneys requested an order for the government to turn over a complete transcript of all grand jury proceedings. They also want prosecutors to disclose the legal instructions they gave to grand jurors about the elements of Hearn’s alleged crime.
Hearn pleaded not guilty earlier this month to one felony count of property destruction and has a trial scheduled to start Sept. 28 in D.C. Superior Court. The charge, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years upon conviction, accuses Hearn of causing at least $1,000 in damage to the pool.
Not surprising, and a good move by Hearn’s attorneys. The Trump DOJ has already established a terrible track record for improperly presenting cases to grand juries, and given how much of a reach even charging this guy is, I would almost expect the DOJ attorneys involved to have ‘finessed’ the grand jury presentation to secure an indictment on such thin evidence.
Looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
“A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich” undersells it, because they’d indict the sandwich for being a giraffe…
It’s not exactly a high threshold, and going off memory, they can just keep trying till it happens.
It’s not like a grand jury can say “no” and that’s the end of it, it’s just a matter of how motivated the feds are and how long they’re willing to keep doing it. They only need “guilty” once, even if it’s on the 101st try.
Technically true, but not practically. If you have a case so weak that you can’t even get a grand jury to get to ‘probable cause’ on the first try, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of a guilty verdict at trial. You generally don’t see the govt. making multiple runs at grand jury presentation.
Yeah, because “normally” the feds have like a 99% conviction rate…
That has completely gone to shit already.
Youre operating under the assumption that the people running the DOJ would tell trump they couldn’t get what he wanted.
If it goes to trial and doesn’t get what trump wants, then trump is mad at the judge.
If it never goes to trial because they stopped trying to force it past a grand jury, trump is mad at the person who stopped trying to push it past the grand jury…
So they’re not gonna stop till a grand jury indicts.
Does any of that make sense?
There’s really no way to explain it any simpler without coming off incredibly condescendingly