This is Bloomberg Law with June Grossel from Bloomberg Radio. We will bring justice to this issue to our community.
We will not stand for this type of discrimination and racism.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bess slammed the Supreme Court's emergency ruling this week that allows ice agents to stop and detain people based on their race, language, job, or location, factors that a federal judge had found unconstitutional. The ruling was six to three, with the conservative justices in the majority and the liberals in descent. Immigration advocates like Columbia Law School professor Alaura Mukherjee say it means the Court has essentially legalized racial profiling.
What this means in practice is that immigration officers, as well as other law enforcement officers, now practically have an invitation to engage in racial profiling when they are carrying out stops. The effect of this decision is that America has become a show me your papers country for the overwhelming majority of people of color.
The ruling was a one paragraph order with no explanation at all from the majority. My guest is a leading authority on racial profiling, Professor David Harris of the University of Pittsburgh Law School. David, I want to start with the basics. When can law enforcement stop someone under the Fourth Amendment.
People can be stopped by the police under the Fourth Amendment when there is reasonable suspicion that a crime is afoot and they may be involved in the crime, and reasonable suspicion is less than probable cause, but it is based on facts and reasons. Now, when we transition from detecting crime to looking at immigration issues, the standard is still reasonable suspicion. There must be facts, and there must
be proper inferences. But what we're looking for, of course, is whether a person is in immigration status or not.
So with this ruling, the Supreme Court put on hold a federal judges order tell us about the order at stayed.
The lower court in Los Angeles had decided that ICE and its law enforcement allies were using factors to stop people that inevitably led to unconstitutional stops, and the lower court had said, you may not use, either alone or in combination, the factors of somebody's Hispanic or Latino appearance, speaking Spanish or having an accent appearance, that you are engaged in low wage work, and being at a location associated with day labor, and the Court said, you can't
do this anymore because I can see from the evidence that I took that this is being done in ways that violate the Constitution. And what the Supreme Court did on its emergency docket was to say, no, no, this order will not go into effect. We're holding it for now until we have more time to look at it.
And Justice Kavanaugh wrote an opinion that is not for the court, saying that he believed that the administration who want to be able to use those factors will succeed when they get to a full hearing, that they'll win, and therefore Ice and the police allies can go back to using those factors when they stop people to see if they are in violation of the immigration laws.
Are they basically saying, well, racial profiling's okay.
Then what they're doing is they're looking back, and this is the best we can tell. We're not really sure, because, like you said, there is no opinion, so we're having
to speculate to some extent. But what they seem to be saying, based on the fact that they stopped the lower courts ruling which would have put a stop to all of this and Justice Kavanaugh's opinion for himself is it's okay to use some combination of those four factors ethnic appearance, Spanish speaking or accent, appearance of being a low wage worker in these particular locations. Now, Kavanaugh was clear on saying, you can't just say, well, this person
looks Mexican and that's enough. But it's a very slippery slope down to exactly that point. Our experience with this sort of thing goes back many years now. I've been studying racial and ethnic profiling for well over thirty years, and we've seen it. We've seen exactly this kind of
thing before. We saw it when Arizona enacted the show your Paper statue back in about two thousand and eight or so, and Sheriff Joe Rpio went to town on that and it was just picking up people because of how they looked in their Spanish speaking or their accent. And that is racial profiling by any other name. I mean, we don't want to call it that, fine, but that's
what happened. Law enforcement begins to lean on the most obvious factors, and that's what the judge saw in Los Angeles, and that's why the judge stopped them from doing this in the first place. So all of this will move immigration enforcement efforts right up to that very same line, and we will have people getting picked up just for how they look and whether they're Spanish speaking. It's going to happen as night follows day.
And the only way we'll find out what factors the immigration officers are relying on is if someone who's detained brings a lawsuit, right.
Exactly, and there will be some cases broad chances there, because one of the other effects of this is going to be that lots of people will be interrogated and even picked up and arrested who are in good order as far as immigration law. That's another thing that we see.
Whenever there is widespread sort of dragnet pulling people in on these very basic factors, they end up making mistakes when they're allowed to lean on those kind of factors, and we will get a few people who end up in custody, maybe for a few days, maybe for a long time, maybe even getting deported before it can be
reversed and they can bring a case. Justice Kavanaugh says in his opinion, well, look, if everything's in order, they'll just let you go and He says it's an important problem in Los Angeles because there's an estimate of stake
two million people who are undocumented in Los Angeles. But what he doesn't say is that there are millions more who share those characteristics, who have ethnic features of people from Latin America, who speak Spanish, who have a Spanish accent, and they're going to be swept up in this two and that's where the cases will probably come from.
Just as Kavanaugh said, as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear of the immigration officers that they are US citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.
He doesn't mention that one of the plaintiffs here, Jason Brian Gavidia, who's an American citizen, was stopped by immigration agents, shoved into a metal fence and his arm was twisted behind his back, all the while that he's shouting, I'm American, I was born in East LA And there's video of it that anyone can see on the internet.
Literally.
Gavidia says that he was frightened and the agents took his phone and ID. He was released, but he never did get his ID card back.
Yeah, this is going to happen. This is going to happen more now that everybody can see, including the ICE agents and the police are helping them, that they've been given the green light. We will have that happen. It's a certainty. And for Justice Cavanaugh to say, hey, it's all fine as long as you carrying your papers with it, well, I mean, do you carry your birth certificate to work? I mean does everybody do that? And even if you do,
you might not get those things back. You can be in big trouble even if you have crushed every t and dited every eye and you were born here. So I just really took offense at that. I think it's somebody who never has to confront these problems making a pronouncement he knows nothing about.
So Justice Sodomayo wrote a stinging descent quote, we should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. She quoted in nineteen seventy five case that said it was unconstitutional for the border patrol to stop a car and question its occupants when the only ground for suspicion was that they appeared to be of Mexican ancestry. Does this shadow docket decision contradict that decision or is it broader?
It's a little broader, But again we're less to speculate because it's just on the shadow docket. But that's a live question. For sure. There is an older case that says things like that you have to go beyond just ethnic appearance, But certainly it does also say that same case, ethnic appearance counts. And my experience, in the experience of those who study this as I have, is that when that's a factor that is relied on, even with others
in the mix, law enforcement leans heavily on. It discounts the other factors that may go in the other direction, and you get mistakes.
Immigration advocates fear that this decision will open the door to racial profiling across the United States. Do you think that now that the Supreme Court has found this is okay in Los Angeles, that it will also be okay in Chicago or New York or other cities.
Well, again, we're left without full knowledge of what the Supreme Court has done or will do. We don't know how far they will go or what they will say in the end. But people who know just the headline, if they're in the enforcement business, that's how they're going to take it. Supreme Court says it's okay to use racial or ethnic appearance. They're not even going to make the distinction that Justice Kavanaugh does, which is that wouldn't be enough by itself. They're going to take it as
racial profiling is okay. And if it's okay in LA, why wouldn't it be okay in Chicago or New York. And when they say blood his own, they mean lots and lots of people from our force will be out there doing this and long range. What you care about is public safety. You are doing the wrong things because public safety depends on public support. You need the public to give the police information about what's what in the neighborhoods.
If this is happening not just to people who might be deported legitimately, let's say, but to people born here because they look a certain way. That is going to alienate people not just from ice, but from police generally, and it makes them less likely to cooperate with any policing of any type. So this immigration policy of flooding the zone with forces with these low accuracy factors, this is going to make it more dangerous for US just on the level of regular crime.
Thanks so much, David. That's Professor David Harris of the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Coming up next. How the Roberts Court has changed the law. I'm June gross when you're listening to Bloomberg. Chief Justice John Roberts famously compared judges to umpires during his confirmation hearings in twenty ten.
Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role.
But many legal experts say the Roberts Court has changed the rules playing anything but the limited role of an umpire. During the twenty years since he's been chief, the Court, with its conservative majority and now conservative supermajority, has dramatically changed the law on abortion, gun rights, race, religion, federal agencies, and presidential power, overturning precedents that got in the way and moving the court further and further to the right.
My guest is constitutional law professor Eric Siegel of Georgia State Universal. Eric, what do you think of Robert's comparison of justices to umpires.
Well, Justice Kavanaugh repeated that years later as well, despite the mockery of virtually all court watchers pungents across the political spectrum on that statement by Justice Roberts, they're not umpires. They've never been umpires. In eighteen fifty seven, Congress wanted to end slavery in the territories. Congress had the power to do that under the Constitution. The Court made up a new rule and said no, And from nineteen hundred to nineteen thirty six the Court struck down hundreds of
laws about minimum wages, overtime rules, and labor conditions. The Constitution allows Congress to do that. The Court wasn't playing like an umpire, And I think conservatives would fairly say that cases like rovers Wait were not the justices acting like umpires. So no, it was a silly statement when he made it. It was even sillier for Justice Kavanaugh to repeat it during this confirmation airing. The Constitution is a very vague document when it comes to litigation, there
are some specific things. The president has to be thirty five to centers from every state. Inauguration day is January twentieth. But we don't litigate those clauses. We litigate due process, equal protection, cruel and usual punishment, unreasonable searchers and seizures, and so on. It'd be a thing to an umpire you get to decide what's fair in a baseball game. That's not what umpires do in baseball. They have some discretion.
Of course, we've told the Supreme Court in effect make the constitutional rules for America, and that has nothing to do with sports.
Someone.
There are a lot of areas where the Roberts Court has changed or reshaped the law. Some changes seem dramatic, like abortion and gun rights. Other changes, like the laws around race, seem slower in coming. Tell us about Robert's role.
There other than the presidential immunity decision in Trump versus the United States, one of the worst opinions in Supreme Court history. In my opinion and many others, leaving aside that opinion written by Justice Roberts, I think he's done the most damage to America when it comes to race, and it started in his very first term, when the cities of Seattle and Louisville. Let's take Louisville for a minute. You know, Louisville had segregation under the law for many,
many years. Those schools were still segregated. So at the very local level, students and teachers and parents and school board members and voters got together and came up with a very limited plan to make sure that the public schools in Louisville had some minimal degree of desegregation so that white kids and black kids in Louisville could go to school together. And no judge ordered this. This was volunteer and in his very first term, the Roberts Court
struck that down. And that's when Justice Roberts said the famous line, the way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race. In the context of Louisville, Kentucky, which discriminated in the basis of race legally for a century, that's, in my opinion, a very bizarre statement. And even Justice Kennedy, who was a fifth vote in that case, disagreed with that statement. So it
started there. Everybody knows that Justice Roberts does not like voting rights as a young attorney in the Reagan administration in nineteen eighty one, he wrote some scathing things about the Voting Rights Act, and then, of course, in Shelby County versus Holder, he was able to concoct a new rule that Congress can't treat different states differently without a strong reason and struck down a law that was passed by a unanimous Senate and signed by a Republican president.
That law was struck down, and then the very next day Texas and North Carolina passed the voting rules they could not have passed prior to that law being struck down. They've also interpreted the Voting Rights Act very narrowly, and I think this next year even more narrowly again. And then, of course there's the Affirmative Action case, which overturned fifty years of president and said colleges and universities are not allowed to use race at all in their admissions process.
It says, if Justice Roberts thinks race was never a problem in this country, it's as if he thinks we can just snap our fingers and all of our racial divisions will go away. And Justice Roberts has really turned a cold shoulder to dealing with those problems.
There was a time when Roberts seemed I guess you could describe it as more middle of the road. He did write the opinion saving Obamacare, and in the Dobbs decision, he wouldn't have gone so far as to actually overturn Roe. So is it Roberts that's moving the court to the right or is it the three Trump appointees that gave the court a conservative supermajority.
There's no question those three Trump appointees have played and will continue to play a significant role in moving the court far to the right. But it's also a little bit of a myth that Justice Roberts was ever anything less than an extremely conservative justice. Yes, he did save
part of Obamacare. Remember he did not save the medicaid part of Obamacare, which was actually a key part of that law, and by striking down that part of law, the Court did serious damage to Obamacare in complicated ways that health policy experts could explain. Before twenty twelve, in a seven years preceding that case, he had never joined with the liberals in a five to four opinion. Since then,
he's joined the liberals a few times. And you're right about Dobbs but there is no question that he would have eventually voted to overturn Row. Justice Roberts' formula has been consistently in voting rights, race cases, abortion cases, and separation of powers cases. Punch holes in the precedent, punch holes in the precedent, then reverse the president. There is no doubt he would have eventually voted to overturn Roe
versus Way. So I think even a five to four court run by Justice Roberts would be an extremely conservative court, and with the exception of Justice Kennedy's votes on affirmative action in gay rights, was an extremely conservative court for most of Justice Roberts's court.
There seems to be a lot of movement lately in the area of federal agency authority, and likely more changes to come. Tell us what's been happening there.
Most of the laws that govern American private conduct and companies, environmental regulations, food and drug regulations, they all come from the executive branch. Congress passes a very broad law saying pollution is bad. President, go fix it. Congress passes the law saying we want to have to stay food. Executive branch, you go ahead and fix that. Well. Donald Trump's a
businessman who doesn't like regulations. He appointed three justices who don't like regulations, and they are doing everything they can to make it harder for the executive branch to pass regulations such as environmental and food and drug laws. And it's very hard for Congress to do it because they
don't want to politically take the hit. So it's not a surprise that this Supreme Court is trying to really go back to a nineteen thirty's pre New Deal understanding of federal power over the economy because these are people who believe, you know, in a tur free marketplace, not burdened by government regulation. And of course not just in the court, but this is filtering down all through the Trump administration. But the justices share that political goal, and that's what we're seeing.
Roberts is the Chief Justice, but his vote is just one of nine votes, So how much power does he wield?
So a very famous lower court judge, maybe the most famous lower court judge of our lifetimes, Judge Richard Posner, used to say that the Chief Justice really has no power except you know, to decide who writes the opinion when he's in the majority, and maybe some administrative rules.
So I have a theory about Chief Justice Roberts's vote in the Obamacare case, which is that from two thousand and five, when Justice Roberts became the chief to twenty twelve, he had no power at all because Justice Kennedy held all the power. In that first term, Justice Kennedy was in the majority of one hundred percent of five votes, and for the next seven years the court went the way Justice Kennedy went. Supreme Court justice is a human beings.
They are people like us. Now they have better jobs than most of us, but they aren't like us. And you know, Chief Justice Roberts, I think always wanted to be on the Supreme Court and always wanted to be Chief Justice. I'm not saying he thought he would ever get that, but you can't go any higher in the law than he went. And he had no power because Justice Kennedy had all the power. I think psychologically that was a factor in his decision in twenty twelve in
the Obamacare case. So the story after twenty twelve became, oh, Justice Roberts is a swing vote also wasn't really true. Today he has very very little power. He has to get either Justice Barrett or Justice Kavanaugh or Justice Gorsich to agree with him when he doesn't want to rule in a conservative fashion, because he's never getting the Leado and Thomas to rule with him. So I would say he has no more power than Gorsic, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. And I'm not even sure he's more power than Justice
Barrett with the exception. And it's a big deal. When he's in the majority, he gets to assign the opinion. But other than that, his vote counts the same. And frankly, I think he was a little bit scarred in the first seven years on the bench when his vote counted much less than Justice Kennedy's vote.
So how do you think he ranks as far as chief justices who've led the court?
My guess is he's going to go down as one of the worst chief Justices. And I say this for the following reason. History has shown that when the Supreme Court lurches far to the left or to the right,
eventually the political system goes the other direction. So when the war In Court went too far to the left, and I'm a liberal progressive who will say I think the Warren Court went too far to the left, then Richard Nixon runs on a law an order campaign run a Reagan runs on Roe versus Wade, you know, and Republicans hold power for most of that time period. In the this Supreme Court, I think, and I think political scientists think, is far to the right of the median
Republican voter, leaving aside the median Democrat voter. So my guess is eventually there will be a cycle where the political system lurches in the other direction, and then we will see just how conservative his court has been. It has been very, very conservative, and there are even conservatives today, scholars, even from federalist society folks, who are saying things like this, respect for precedent is not a conservative value. Right Conservatives
like the status quo. Progressives want to change the status quote. The Roberts Court has been reversing important precedents at I think a rate that's probably unheard of in American history. I'm not saying they're reversing more cases. The importance is are the reversing important cases guns, abortion, affirmative action, separation of church and state, separation of powers, and even federalism,
which traditionally has been a very conservative value. Those areas of the law have been dramatically rechhaped in two short decades. There's no definition of conservative that I know that suggests that judges should be the ones doing it.
And looking at the term coming up, there may be more changes ahead. Thanks so much, Eric, that's professor Eric Siegel of the Georgia State University coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show. They say that prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Well, it seems that doesn't apply to the prosecutors in the DCUs Attorney's office. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg.
You've probably heard the famous saying that prosecutors have so much influence on grand juries they could get them to indict a ham sandwich. Well maybe not if that prosecutor is in the DCUs Attorney's office trying to get a gret to indict someone overthrowing a salami sandwich at a federal agent. DCUs attorney Janine Piro bragged about charging the man who threw the sandwich with a felony of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer.
And then he took a subway sandwich about this big and took it and threw it at the officer. He thought it was funny. Well, he doesn't think it's funny today, because we charge it with a felony assault on a police officer, and we're going to back.
The police to the hilt.
So there, stick your subway sandwich somewhere else.
But the grand jury apparently didn't get Piero's joke, and the US Attorney's Office didn't get their felony indictment against Sean Dunn, known now as the Sandwich Guy. Prosecutors have now charged him with a misdemeanor of simple assault, which doesn't require a grand jury's input. It's extraordinarily rare for a grand jury to refuse to return an indictment, but it's happened with DC grand juries at least seven times since President Trump ordered a surge in patrols by federal
agents and troops in the nation's capital. Joining me is former federal prosecutor Robert Mintz, a partner Mat Carter. In English Bile, people know the basics of the workings of a jury even if they haven't been on one, because it's depicted so much in the movies and on TV, but less so about the workings of a grand jury. So tell us about the grand jury.
A grand jury proceeding is necessary when ever, prosecutors are seeking to bring a felony charge. Under the Fifth Amendment, there is a requirement for capital or otherwise infamous crime to go before a grand jury, which in the federal system is between sixteen and twenty two citizens, in order
to establish probable cause to bring the charge. But that means is prosecutors have to ass thankfully present their case to the grand jurors in order to bring the indictment, and what goes on in the grand jury is entirely controlled by prosecutors. It's a presentation in which only the prosecutor is present. The defense lawyer is not allowed inside the grand jury. The defendant does not get a right
to testify before the grand jury. It's really the prosecutor asking questions of witnesses, who may summarize interviews on other evidence that they've gathered, and allow for hear stake to be presented to the grand jury to establish whether or not there is probable cost to bring that charge. Now bear in mind that probable cause is a very low bar.
It only means that there is a reason to proceed with the case and that the prosecutor is able to get an indictment and then that case will go to trial. But prosecutors can only bring a case that they believe that a reasonable jury can convict down the road on
the standard of trial is beyond reasonable doubt. So getting an indictment in front of a grand jury is usually a very easy task for prosecutors and is exceedingly rare for prosecutors to present a case to a grand jury and not have the grand jury return an indictment.
Has that ever happened to you?
I was a prosecutor for ten years and I never had a single instance in which the grand jury refused to indict, and while I was in the office, I think it only happened about one time. So it is very very rare, and it's rare for a couple of reasons. Number One, prosecutors only bring cases where they believe there is strong evidence, because again the case has to go
beyond the charging stage. Prosecutors have to believe that they could ultimately convince a jury of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the highest standard we have in our legal system. And so in order to be able to satisfy that standard, there certainly has to at least be probable cause, which is the very lowest standard we have in order to
bring the charges. The other reason is that prosecutors are very selective in which cases they bring, and they tend to bring cases in which there is overwhelming evidence and they believe that they're be able to gain that conviction that trial. Otherwise, prosecutors can decline to bring the case, or they can bring different charges that would be easier for them to prove at a trial.
And whereas at trial in a criminal case the jurors have to be unanimous, in a grand jury, they don't have to be unanimous.
Right, That's exactly right. A criminal trial does have to be a unanimous verdict. In order to get what's called a true bill, or have grand jurors return an indictment, you only need twelve of those grand jurors to vote in favor of the indictment.
One of the cases where the US Attorney's Office couldn't get an indictment involved a woman who allegedly tried to interfere with the transfer of two people into ice custody, and the US Attorney's Office was trying to get an indictment for felony assault against a federal officer. Three grand juries refused three, so the office opted to charge a misdemeanor instead.
It's very unusual. In order to sustain a charge of assaulting a federal officer, prosecutors have to show that the federal officer face a fear of death or serious bodily injury, and it does carry a penalty of up to eight years in prison. So it's very unusual for grand jurys to be faced with a potential charge of assaulting a federal officer and not return an indictment. There really are two possible reasons why that happened, And again, what goes on in a grand jury is entirely secret, so we
don't really know what their reasons are. And when a grand jury decides not to return a true bill or not to return an indictment, they don't have to give any reasons and don't give any reasons. It's simply a vote that either is twelve in favor of indictment or not twelve in favor of indictment. So at the end of the day, we don't really know the grand jury's reasoning, but we can surmise that it's really one of two things.
Either prosecutors hadn't made out their case for probable cause, which it only means there's evidence that a crime has been committed and that the individual who prosecutors are seeking to charge have committed that crime, or the other reason is something called jury nullification, which really happens at trials
more than it happens in front of grand juries. And what happens there is that sometimes jurors will hear a case and jurors may actually believe that the prosecution has met its burden of proof, but for other reasons decide that they are not going to vote for a conviction. That's something called jury nullification, and it generally happens when there's some feeling among jurors that there's been some overreaching
by prosecutors or some improper conduct by prosecutors. Once again, the jury system, just like the grand jury system, is entirely secret, and prosecutors as a general rule, never find out why jurors vote a particular way unless there is some aleked impropriety in the jury process, but otherwise there's no way of knowing why jurors vote a particular way. All they will know is at the end of the day,
the jurors did not vote in favor of conviction. And sometimes it happens because jurors simply believe that there's something improper about the charge, about the nature of the prosecution, about the way prosecutors handle the case, and so even though prosecutors may have met the burden of proof, the jury may decide not to convict. It really is kind of an act of civil disobedience by juries, and it very rarely happens, but it does happen on occasion.
You heard Pierro saying we're going to back our police to the hilt. And these cases that we've been talking about involve assaults of some kind on law enforcement. For example, the guy who threw the subway sandwich at the federal officer, and there was another case where a guy was accused of swinging his arms at a park police officer. So is this likely the grand jurys saying they're overcharging these cases.
Well, we don't really know why grand juries are refusing to return indictments here, but I think it's a fair assumption that the grand jurors are looking at these charges and deciding that either there is no probable cause which
seems unlikely. The more likely conclusion I think we can reach here is that the grandeurs are deciding that prosecutors are overcharging, that they're looking at the body camera evidence so they can see exactly what went on here and asking themselves, while that may have been improper, while the defendant may have touched a federal officer, while they may have acted improperly, did they really assault them? Were they're
really intending death or serious bodily harm? And it may well be that grandeurs are putting themselves in the shoes of the defendant and saying, what would I do in that circumstance where maybe I was very upset, or maybe the defendant is placed in a situation where they felt that what was going on by the National Guard or by federal officers was somehow went proper And again, touching of a federal officer or any way impeding what's going on in terms of federal officers trying to conduct their
business is improper. But the question is does it amount to assaulting a federal officer or is really some lesser charge more appropriate. But I think what we can conclude here is that in those instances, grandeurs believe that prosecutors were overcharging those cases and that while the conduct may have been inappropriate, it didn't rise to the level of assaulting a federal officer.
Is a grand jury considered sort of a safeguard against prosecutorial overreach.
Concept of an indictment is enshrined in the Fifth Amendment, So even going back to the founding of this country, there was always a concern about the government being able to bring charges on its own, and that's why we have this concept of the grand jury where they hear evidence and prosecutors have to convince those grand jurors, who
are just like any other jurors out there. They are randomly selected and then they are questioned and then they're made a part of this grand jury and all they do is hear evidence for possible charges, and it goes on for about a year and a half while they sit and hear these cases once a week. But they are put in place pursue it to the intent of the framers of the Constitution to act at the buffer between the government and decisions to charge citizens.
And also a federal magistrate has criticized the DCUs attorney, saying that people are being held in jail while the US Attorney is trying to get these indictments from a grand jury.
Again, this is really very unprecedented because usually indictments are given very freely, and that really is pretty much the case because of the way prosecutors control that whole proceeding. So it's very unusual for prosecutors to have to go in front of a grand jury multiple times in order to try to get an indictment, and all the while
that's happening, the defendant is remaining in jail. What is also extremely unusual is for the US Attorney in Washington, d c. To name Piro to get into stick a public dispute with a sitting magistrate judge where she is calling him out by name and the magistrate judge is so openly critical of the US Attorney's office. We rarely
see that kind of public display between prosecutors and judges. Generally, there is a level of trust that judges have in the federal government and particularly with regard to the US Attorney's offices, and my experience, judges did show a degree of deference to federal prosecutors. And when there comes a time where judges are no longer trusting. It really does throw stand to the gears of the justice.
System, and that's reportedly happening in other courtrooms as well. Thanks Bob. That's Robert Mints of McCarter and English and that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot bloomberg dot com, slash podcast Slash Law, and remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every
weeknight at ten pm Wall Street Time. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg