alt Hacker NewsThis is not a jury nullification (which is an emergent property of US Constitutional double-jeopardy protections), but a failure to indict, that is to bring criminal charges (a "bill of indictment") for potential criminal conduct.
In this instance, the case has been dismissed, but might conceivably be brought again.
Why grand juries make the decisions they do is hard to determine, as their operations are (usually) secret. This may have simply been a case of insufficient evidence of a crime, or identity of the suspect ("probable cause"), as appealing as a broader backlash theory might be.
Much of this article appears to be either speculation or unsourced information if there was in fact resistance to bringing a Flock case by this grand jury. The latter might indicate a violation of secrecy oaths by jury members or other court officers.
Specific practices vary by state, not all of which use grand juries. All federal criminal cases rely on a grand jury.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_juries_in_the_United_Sta...>
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Since Ohio is a fairly red state, I wonder if this could be a "You can food some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." As much as I am angry at MAGA for not prioritizing my civil liberties, it does seem like conservatives are starting to notice that those in power don't actually care about conservative principles like privacy, small government, and individual liberty.
> Police in Union Township, a Cincinnati suburb, accused Cody Morelock of disassembling the camera, its support pole and solar panel on June 13.
To add to this, it stood out to me that the headline uses "destroy" but the article uses "disassemble" to describe what happened. Not that the act of calmly dissasembling something couldn't be indicted as potentially criminal (if a ham sandwich can be), but it stands out regardless. Maybe he literally just walked up and started unscrewing things. That would be the most civil form of "vandalism" I can imagine; force them to (pay someone to) come set it up again until they give up or try something else.
True, it does not say the reason for the decline to indict. It could have as much to do with the overall decline in quality of the DoJ and its cases as a whole over the past year. Many nonsalient crimes will also go unprosecuted under this DoJ, but they will not generate headlines like this one.
This sure feels exactly like jury nullification