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.
Though 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.
The state could contract a criminal defense lawyer to prosecute, they probably already have antagonistic relationship with police.
This is how it should be done. But police departments strongly resist even administrative discipline by independent bodies.
Why would the state do that unless forced?
That's either a very shallow or deep question. :)
I'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.
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This recent phenomenon is interesting to me because a jury of peers is standing up for individuals against corporate/government overreach.
Do 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.
I 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.
> just as likely
If you look at the success rate of prosecutors getting grand juries to indict, it's certainly not "just as likely".
that sounds exactly like "a jury of peers is standing up for individuals against corporate/government overreach"
This attitude can be a strong precursor to positive change. In Canada, Dr. Morgentaler performed abortions in Montréal, and prosecutors were unable to compose a jury of enough people who would return a guilty verdict for any abortion. So it created an untenable situation for the government, who had no choice but to let doctors completely break the law until they were deemed unconstitutional against the newly penned charter.
This is why it's important for us to show up and do jury duty even if it's not sexy. You can make a difference.
Not real recent. Nullification like this goes far back. It just requires a certain level of bias across the jury pool. After which, some people or companies will be unable to be protected by criminal law.
As others in this thread point out, this is not nullification. Nullification is a different thing and grand juries cannot do it.
> Nullification is a different thing and grand juries cannot do it.
It might not fit the textbook definition of jury nullification, but it would absolutely fit the spirit of the definition.
If the prosecution presents nearly irrefutable proof that the Ohio man destroyed the camera (Which from what I've heard is the case), but the grand jury declined to indict anyway because they're vehemently against Flock cameras and want to stick it to the government, then as far as I'm concerned, that's nullification.
It doesn’t fit the spirit, because it doesn’t have the legal qualities of nullification. In particular, the prosecutor can choose to empanel a new grand jury and seek a new indictment on the exact same charge.
That's a technical distinction over which the original jurors have no control. I think the scenario described in GP exactly meets the spirit of nullification.
The entire point is that they have no control! That’s what makes it not nullification.
Why can't grand juries do it? I thought that it's when juries intentionally rule against what the law says, while saying otherwise, as a consequence of juries not being able to be penalized for their ruling. I don't seen any reason that the same can't happen with a grand jury.
A web search comes up with articles saying that it's more common with non-grand juries, but that's not the same as "cannot do it", while they also speak about a prosecutor's ability to re-indict, but that still doesn't guarantee them a charge.
Nullification is based on a contradiction in terms: juries cannot be punished for the judgments they render, and prosecutors may not re-try a case to obtain their preferred outcome (“double jeopardy”).
With a grand jury, the second term doesn’t apply: the grand jury’s decision doesn’t prevent a second indictment.
So in other words: grand juries can choose to render “faithless” decisions, but they can’t nullify a case in the sense that matters.
It may have to do with the state of accusations. Pre-grand jury there is no evidence of a crime. Once a grand jury rules with the prosecutor a crime has been defined.
Not 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.
If 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.
Solomon "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>
More 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.
> He was a republican.
He was born in 1930, though, so it's hard to say that he shares much in common with the ideology we call republican today.
I appreciated the interesting info on the originator of this quote, though this sentence made no sense to me:
> This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
Frankly, I've seen all types of people use this quote, not just Republicans, which is a simple statement that there is a very low bar to indict in a grand jury proceeding, which any reasonable assessment of the statistics would deem true. The fact that the originator of the quote turned out to be a douchebag is totally irrelevant.
Also, I think this part is missing a very important step:
> 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.
While that may explain the very high conviction rate at trial, getting a grand jury indictment was also an excellent way for prosecutors to get a plea deal if the accused was looking at decades in jail even if the "beyond a reasonable doubt" threshold would be unlikely to be met.
> He was a republican.
And Democrats were the party of slavery. Why do you bring this up? I'd think the Hackernews crowd would know history and wouldn't be surprised that on a long enough time line, philosophies change.
>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?
No, 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.
Ah, so it was topical!
Law & 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.
You _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.
James Comey was indicted by the government for posting a picture of seashells.
For anyone not familiar with slang, to be "86'd" means banned. You get 86'd from a bar. They don't murder you on the way out.
In restaurant server parlance it means "item no longer available". The stock of baked potatoes has been depleted so the word goes out to the serving staff to "86 the baked potatoes".
don't stand next to the reflecting pool, you'll get arrested because the president is embarrassed by his own incompetence
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Nonsense.
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
I'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?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/86
What do you think '86' means? Do you understand that it is not literally the word 'murder'?
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This 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.
Contrast: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386895>.
(Cop-City activist arrested for failure to provide smartphone data in a customs search.)
not 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.
you 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.
What would have been the appropriate charge?
simple assault or disorderly conduct
But that wouldn't have put him in prison for life.
It 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!
> 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.
Though 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-sandwic...
Administration 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.
Debatable since they really wanted to prosecute the guy and still failed to. We're not completely bereft of the separations yet.
But 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).
Grand 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-...
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?
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.
Those people throwing tea into the harbor are destroying property for political reason and are wrong and should be considered terrorists.
If they don't like the King's governors they should petition the court to appoint one that more aligns with their taxation desires.
Also, only knaves and fools would be concerned with The Crown's modest regulations for reporting "meta data" on all guilds and meeting-houses.
"Using Metadata to find Paul Revere": https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Terrorism requires people to be in terror. Is putting the flock cameras up or taking them down causing more terror?
Or more narrowly, terrorism is the use or threat of violence to influence a political outcome.
Clearly not the case here
The political outcome is that Peter Thiel wants to have full control of all security apparatus around the world. Fighting Flock is 100% a political fight.
When the removal of Flock prevented police from apprehending a kidnapper in Houston, I would consider that pretty terrifying. It's like cutting the brakes of police cars or deflating their tires.
Get a grip man.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/...
From what I'm seeing online, it looks like Houston started installing Flock cameras in 2022. How were they investigating kidnapping cases before that?
I'd be astonished if decades of methodology and infrastructure for investigating crime have all completely evaporated in the wake of a new and experimental tool -- one that's neither fully demonstrated its reliability as an investigation tool nor that it does not itself create a threat to public safety.
It's a bit polemical to blame their failure to apprehend their suspect on the lack of an tool that shouldn't have been necessary to apprehend the suspect in the first place, don't you think?
Unless you're an [ex-partner and/or woman seeking an out of state abortion](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/13/flock-saf...). So it's like deflating a police car's tires while the occupant is getting ready to stalk his ex-girlfriend.
> It's like cutting the brakes of police cars or deflating their tires
These two things are decidedly not on the same level. Cutting someone's brakes is an attempt to kill the driver. Deflating tires is just plain old property damage.
Well the government was illegitimate. Is that what you're contending happening here? Are you trying to overthrow the police department or municipal government? How do you feel about Jan 6?
I think the extrajudicial use of these types of surveillance is an illegitimate use of power and thus fine to be destroyed.
If you're against [X] you can destroy property? This isn't an argument. Do you understand why this doesn't work in democracy?
If I'm against police force can I set their cars on fire.
I'm against abortion, so I can set abortion clinics on fire.
I'm against data centers, I can blow them up.
Try harder
The comment you're responding to didn't formulate the argument as "I am against [X], therefore I am justified in destroying property used to do [X]", but is rather closer "[X] is itself illegal and therefore I am justified in potentially destroying property in order to stop imminent lawbreaking".
You can argue the point as to whether this particular "[X]" actually does constitute illegal activity that a citizen is justified in responding to with force, but I don't think it's valid to mischaracterize the argument as the response being justified solely by personal opposition.
Well you can do whatever you want but those are hardly equivalent to destroying a camera.
Of course you can, just you likely won't get any sympathy in the large number of cases where the public or government doesn't agree with you (police, abortion clinics).
In this case looks like the people agree with destroying these things.
Violence is increasingly the only path forward in America.
Apparently >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.
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No, the democratic way would have been to have a vote(yes, with the citizenry, not somebody "elected") if you want to allow mass surveillance.
Like they do in Switzerland.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-democracy/how-swiss-direc...
Petition the mayor, you can't be real.
This gives me an idea for a (less il)legal alternative: hang "Big Brother is Watching" signs on all of the Flock cameras. Or maybe we can pass a law saying Flock has to do it. That seems like the ideal compromise.
That's a beautiful fantasy but that's just not how America works at this point. Everyone has ulterior motives to keep the meat grinder running.
> would otherwise be considered terrorism
Watching what everyone does at all times is terrorism, and it is the people's right to defend themselves against such.
> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition...
This is also the democratic way, arguably more democratic, it's just probabilistic. Juries are supposed to be randomly sampled from the jurisdiction's population (a kind of democratic process). The ability of a jury to judge the law, and not just the particular crime is a feature, not a bug of the justice system. This is how the system is set up, and it is as legitimate as action through a legislative process.
EDIT: the parent asked a legitimate question in good faith, there is no need to downvote them because you disagree with their implied current understanding of an issue.
> 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).
> 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-surve...) that Americans are fine with it.
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