Prosecutor Jeanine Pirro failed to secure a felony indictment against the woman three times, then lost a jury trial on a misdemeanor charge. Ouch.
A Washington, D.C., woman accused of assaulting a federal agent was found not guilty by a jury on Thursday, the latest embarrassment for Jeanine Pirro, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Prosecutors had alleged Sidney Lori Reid kicked a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent during an altercation outside the D.C. Jail in July. Reid had been filming Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while they were detaining a man who’d just been released from the jail.
Pirro’s office tried three times to indict Reid on a felony assault charge, but D.C. grand juries declined to return an indictment each time — a highly unusual occurrence that suggested the flimsiness of the government’s case.
After whiffing on the felony counts, prosecutors ended up trying Reid on a misdemeanor charge of assaulting or impeding a federal agent — but they couldn’t even win that case. The jury deliberated for less than two hours on Thursday before returning the verdict of not guilty, WUSA9 reported.
This is exactly it. It costs a lot of money to hire attorneys and time, effort, and aggravation to fight charges. As a consequence, this weaponization of the justice system serves to chill the exercise of constitutional rights.
Yep. Many will feel compelled to take a plea because they don’t have the money to hire an attorney, and court-appointed attorneys are so over-loaded with cases they encourage the plea-route too.