The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago said Wednesday it has imposed new rules for prosecutors using grand juries, moving to constrain a growing scandal that forced it to drop charges against people indicted for anti-ICE protests.
U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros said he’ll also share partial transcripts of usually secret grand jury proceedings with defense lawyers in other cases handled by the prosecutors involved in the ICE matter.
Mr. Boutros was forced to act after U.S. District Judge April M. Perry said she was “shocked” by reading what one of Mr. Boutros’s prosecutors had done before the grand jury that indicted the so-called “Broadview Six” for their protest last fall.
Judge Perry said the assistant U.S. attorney who presented the case to the grand jury improperly used her personal credibility to vouch for the seriousness of the charges to the jurors, made improper communications with some jurors outside the grand jury room, and excused grand jurors who disagreed with the government’s take on the case.
After the judge began grilling the government lawyers in court last week, Mr. Boutros rushed to her courtroom and announced he was dismissing the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again.
The case is the latest in a string of mishaps for the Trump Justice Department that involve U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Justice Department’s zeal to defend ICE and its policies have sparked a wave of allegations — and judicial findings — of misconduct by government lawyers.
In New York, Justice Department lawyers admitted ICE misled them about authority to make arrests at immigration courts. In Rhode Island, ICE gagged the prosecutor from telling a judge about a murder arrest warrant for an illegal immigrant — then DHS publicly complained when the judge ordered the man released. In Minnesota, the chief federal judge counted dozens of judicial orders ICE had defied.
In the Chicago case, Mr. Boutros told Judge Perry last week there was “no deliberate misconduct.”
On Wednesday, he blamed the procedures that he said he inherited from past administrations, and said he was fixing those.
“These remediations should also be deeply curative and put to rest once and for all the divergent practices that have existed across the Office for decades, including from one assistant U.S. Attorney to another as well as from one generation to the next,” he said.
He said he’s requiring new training, and stricter rules about how prosecutors can present their cases to grand juries.
He said the reforms now make the Northern District of Illinois a leader in grand jury transparency.
Grand juries are the way the government brings felony charges. They involve a prosecutor making a case that there is sufficient evidence to accuse someone of the crime.
There is no judge involved, and prosecutors have wide latitude to present their cases, though they are supposed to operate within standards.
Mr. Boutros’s “sweeping … remediation plan” indicates his office failed those standards.
Grand jury proceedings are generally kept secret, though Judge Perry has authorized disclosure of the proceedings in the ICE protest case, saying the public deserves to see what happened.
“United States citizens have a right to understand how their government is functioning. And when things do not function as they should, they have a right to know that. Our democracy does not work if public officials can hide what they’re doing from public inspection and judgment,” the judge said in court last week.
She has said she will entertain a motion for sanctions against government lawyers involved.
Mr. Boutros said he first squelched the grand jury indictment in April after learning of issues. But he still proceeded with misdemeanor charges.
Last week he dropped those, too.
He also agreed to include a banner boldly noting the charges had been dismissed on top of the online press release that announced the indictment last year.
That indictment charged six people with forcibly impeding a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in September.
The indictment said the six surrounded the agent’s vehicle as he tried to drive into an ICE detention facility in Broadview, just west of Chicago.
Prosecutors said the six banged on the windows and body of the vehicle and tried to rock it. They scratched the word “PIG” into the paint and broke a side mirror and a windshield wiper.
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