The return of the grand jury
By 
As Jack McCoy once said, there’s meat on a ham sandwich:
A grand jury Tuesday night declined to indict two protesters in the Chicago area accused of assaulting law enforcement, the latest in a shocking string of failures by the Trump Department of Justice.
Securing grand jury indictments is usually nearly automatic; only the prosecutors get to present evidence, and the bar is much lower for indicting someone than proving their guilt. But the Trump administration, in its eagerness to crack down on protesters resistant to its brutality, has now been rebuffed by grand juries in Illinois, Washington D.C. and California.
The official ICE account had crowed about the Chicago-area protesters’ arrests online, promising that they’d be “held accountable” and that “we will not be deterred.”
In perhaps the most famous of these jury rebellions, D.C. jurors refused to indict Sean Dunn — the former Justice Department employee who threw a hoagie at an officer — in August, forcing prosecutors to charge him with a misdemeanor instead.
It’s a stunning rebuke, a reflection of the thin gruel that prosecutors are presenting as they attempt to throw the book at protesters for minor infractions — and perhaps an expression of protest against the state violence being visited on these cities in general.
Every bulwark of liberty, including nearly vestigial ones, counts.