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For those that don't know, grand juries declining an indictment is extremely rare. A grand jury is basically a check on prosecution, that they have to have some
by openasocket 1mo ago
For those that don't know, grand juries declining an indictment is extremely rare. A grand jury is basically a check on prosecution, that they have to have some initial evidence before charging someone with a felony. The standards are much lower than the subsequent criminal proceedings.
The grand jury only hears from the prosecution, there is no defense involved. Only a majority of the grand jury has to sign off, not unanimous like in an actual trial. The standard of evidence is just probable cause, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The rules of evidence are relaxed, meaning hearsay and other evidence can potentially be introduced that would normally be barred from a trial.
Because of the above, the rate of indictment from a grand jury is very high, over 90%. Most prosecutors will go their entire careers without getting a "no true bill" (meaning the grand jury did not sign off on an indictment). There's a saying that "a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich." So the fact that there was no indictment here is a big deal. It will probably hurt that prosecutor's career.
- cwnyth 1mo agoIf it didn't originate with the show, Law & Order (the original run) has the line: "You could get a ham sandwich indicted" was said to Jack McCoy in one episode. I think I remember it coming up again in another episode.
- V-eHGsd_ 1mo agoYou _used_ to be able to indict a ham sandwich anyway. These days the federal government can’t even manage to indict someone caught on video throwing a hand sandwich at law enforcement.
- pavlov 1mo agoJames Comey was indicted by the government for posting a picture of seashells.
- imperio59 1mo ago[flagged]
- ratelimitsteve 1mo agodon't stand next to the reflecting pool, you'll get arrested because the president is embarrassed by his own incompetence
- supercrevette 1mo ago[flagged]
- Planktonne 1mo agoNonsense. Using the most motivated possible reasoning, you can just about stretch to an implicit call for murder but - Definitely not an explicit one - There are far stronger non-murder interpretations
- mionhe 1mo agoI've been unable to think of any in light of what was going on at the time and his previous messaging. Can you share some interpretations you've come up with that fit those criteria?
- Planktonne 1mo agoWhat do you think '86' means? Do you understand that it is not literally the word 'murder'?
- anonymars 1mo agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/86 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/86
- natebc 1mo ago[dead]
- s3p 1mo agoThis seems like a very one sided view honestly. You could also say that, these days, the federal government can’t even manage to indict their political enemies, because DOJ under the current admin keeps getting laughed out of court.
- spl757 1mo agonot every time. there are people in jail/prison due to the times that the DOJ does not get laughed out of court. I think someone accused of being "antifa" got 100 years to make an example. I don't have the article to site, but shouldn't be hard to find.
- dredmorbius 1mo agoContrast: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386895>. (Cop-City activist arrested for failure to provide smartphone data in a customs search.)
- mindslight 1mo agoIt does really demonstrate societal rot - the public's loss of trust in so-called "law enforcement" due to how they've come to often behave as lawless thugs. And so if you want to restore the public's trust (vital social technology), then advocate for civil rights and legal accountability on those tasked with enforcing the law!
- ratelimitsteve 1mo agoyou can indict a ham sandwich if you don't try to convince a grand jury that a mustard stain is terrorism. the grand jury found that throwing a sandwich at someone doesn't rise to the level of assault. what dude did was never contested, and they would have gotten a conviction if they charged appropriately, but instead they tried to "make an example" of him and instead they got made an example of.
- fwipsy 1mo agoWhat would have been the appropriate charge?
- ratelimitsteve 1mo agosimple assault or disorderly conduct
- Filligree 1mo agoBut that wouldn't have put him in prison for life.
- wang_li 1mo agoLaw & Order often takes from reality. The ham sandwich phrase is attributed to Solomon Wachter who was a judge on the New York court of Appeals and is anecdotally dated to the mid or late '80s. And then went widely into the culture and has shown up in novels, academic papers, and tv.
- dredmorbius 1mo agoSolomon "Sol" Wachtler appears to have coined the phrase. He is a retired New York judge, ultimately chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals. And still living at 96. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Wachtler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Wachtler>
- pohl 1mo agoMore color to this tidbit: He was a republican. He wanted to stop using grand juries to bring indictments, so he wasn’t impartial in his assessment. Unrelatedly, he had an affair with a republican fund-raiser. When it ended, started making threats to kidnap her daughter, who was 14 at the time. He sent a sexually explicit note to the daughter, enclosing a condom. He got a 15-month prison sentence. This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”. The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal. They haven’t lived up to those standards for a couple years now.
- ljsprague 1mo ago>This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”. Do you think that only Republicans say this or something?
- pohl 1mo agoNo, but there’s more incentive to propagate the trope of you or your friends find themselves in a position where downplaying a federal indictment is a PR move you’d want to make. Yes, that could be anyone, but the indictment rate by party of administration sure is an interesting statistic.
- JuniperMesos 1mo agoThe democratic party is the party in the US more often concerned with the interests of people accused of crimes by the criminal justice system. Republicans are more often concerned with the criminal justice system being insufficiently punitive and therefore tolerating crime.
- micromacrofoot 1mo agoThough it has been happening a little more with the current administration, which in fact did try to indict someone over (throwing) a sandwich (grand jury declined to do so) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/us/politics/trump-sandwich-assault-indictment-justice-department.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/us/politics/trump-sandwic...
- mindslight 1mo agoAdministration implies bureaucracy - separation of powers, the rule of law, formal procedures, dispassionately executing a job, etc. What we have at the moment is a regime.
- micromacrofoot 1mo agoDebatable since they really wanted to prosecute the guy and still failed to. We're not completely bereft of the separations yet.
- mindslight 1mo agoBut those labels are generally directed at the executive branch (the $President administration). Their failure was due to checks in the judicial branch. So we have a regime in the executive, but still have a somewhat functioning judiciary (despite the related push to further rot it from the top down).
- Aurornis 1mo ago> It will probably hurt that prosecutor's career. Can you say more about this? I’m curious about what the career path looks like for these prosecutors and where the decision points are for their career progression. Great comment with some good information.
- detourdog 1mo agoThis recent phenomenon is interesting to me because a jury of peers is standing up for individuals against corporate/government overreach.
- alphazard 1mo agoNot sure why your comment is being downvote. That is in fact the best explanation for what is going on here, and the outcome has little to do with the competence of the prosecutor, as is perhaps alluded to by the original comment. It's good to see individuals on a jury acting according to rational self-interest.
- gorgoiler 1mo agoDo we know that to be the case? This could just as likely be an incompetent prosecutor showing up with inadequate or invalidated evidence and the jury throwing the case out on grounds of procedural incompetence rather than sympathy.
- detourdog 1mo agoI don’t know it for a fact but the prosecutors apparently had video evidence and sales receipts. I was definitely projecting my own feelings on the grand jury response.
- ludicrousdispla 1mo agothat sounds exactly like "a jury of peers is standing up for individuals against corporate/government overreach"
- mbrameld 1mo ago> just as likely If you look at the success rate of prosecutors getting grand juries to indict, it's certainly not "just as likely".
- senordevnyc 1mo agoThe stat is very high, but that doesn’t tell you anything about why grand juries don’t indict in the small percentage where they don’t, nor why they elected not to here.
- bko 1mo agoWouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own? Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism. But then again, people suspend reason when it comes to certain topics so I'm not surprised.
- ParentiSoundSys 1mo ago> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own? Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence? > Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism. "Terrorism," at this point, is just a term used to describe any action taken in opposition to the ruling class and its objectives of total domination & control, assuming that it has some potential to be effective (in contrast to toothless protests or voting).
- SpicyLemonZest 1mo ago> Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence? I'm not sure where you got "near-unanimous" from. I think Flock cameras were rolled out en masse because public video surveillance has been common for a long time, and polling data has historically suggested (e.g. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/5881-63-accept-video-surveillance-protection-against-te https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/5881-63-accept-video-surve...) that Americans are fine with it.
- montagg 1mo agoApparently >50% of a jury did not agree with you, in this case, and that is one form of democracy we have to make sure decisions come from the consent of the governed. Looks like democracy to me.
- aqme28 1mo agoThough sometimes a prosecutors office will use a grand jury to fail to indict intentionally, like when the accused is a police officer they work with. It's a good way to launder away a prosecution that the DA doesn't want to pursue for political reasons.
- Analemma_ 1mo agoI've banged on about this before, but every state needs to adopt a law where allegations of illegal behavior by cops are always handled by a Special Prosecutor, never the local DA. The incentives are too fucked for a DA to ever be trusted to handle it properly.
- engineer_22 1mo ago[flagged]
- axus 1mo agoThe state could contract a criminal defense lawyer to prosecute, they probably already have antagonistic relationship with police.
- pixl97 1mo agoWhy would the state do that unless forced?
- actionfromafar 1mo agoThat's either a very shallow or deep question. :)
- BobaFloutist 1mo agoBecause it doesn't benefit the state to hav corrupt cops?
- pixl97 1mo ago
- dreamcompiler 1mo agoGrand juries seem to have become newly relevant recently. In a number of cases they have refused to indict Trump's perceived enemies and in one case they almost literally refused to indict a ham sandwich. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/07/trump-grand-juries-letitia-james-comey-indictments-00713579 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/07/trump-grand-juries-...
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]