WASHINGTON — A D.C. Superior Court judge has permanently banned Jeanine Pirro’s office from bringing charges against a former Olympic canoeist over damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Judge Todd Edelman entered an order on Thursday that dismissed the case with prejudice.
Attorneys for David “Davey” Hearn and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia sparred in court last month over whether Hearn’s Reflecting Pool case should be dismissed with prejudice, meaning prosecutors would be barred from bringing another case against him. At the center of much of the discussion: Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on Pirro’s office and his decision to link his desire for prosecution to the political beliefs of Hearn and one of his attorneys, Norm Eisen.
Pirro’s office dropped the case in late July after evidence showed the area was already damaged, and Hearn’s team moved to ban the office from bringing another case in August.
At an unrelated press conference last month, Pirro declined to answer several questions from reporters about her handling of the Reflecting Pool case.
Pirro’s office wanted to maintain its ability to bring a theoretical case, even though its own evidence — that the section of the Reflecting Pool that Hearn allegedly touched was already damaged, and they can’t prove more than $1,000 in damage — would make bringing another felony case impossible.
“What future prosecution could even occur?” Edelman asked at the hearing.
“That I don’t know,” said Michael Spence, a career official in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
“Give me an example of one possible thing that could happen” to change the fundamentally flawed case, the judge asked. “Even theoretically, what could there be?”
Spence conceded he had no satisfactory answer. He added that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had no investigation going into Hearn “as of this second” but said that could change.
Edelman noted that it was going to be pretty difficult to find a case with similar circumstances to Hearn’s case, and asked Spence how he was supposed to look at Trump’s statements calling for a prosecution that Pirro’s office admits was meritless. The president’s statements, Spence said, “speak for themselves.”
Steve Levin, an attorney for Hearn, said prosecutors “had no case” and that the government abused its prosecutorial discretion by rushing to indict Hearn to please the president, misleading a grand jury along the way.
“That’s where the bad faith comes into play,” Levin said. How is Hearn supposed to trust the grand jury process, Levin asked, given that the case got through before? “There’s no confidence that Mr. Hearn has that the grand jury will do the right thing” if another case was presented,” he said.
Pirro’s office, Levin argued, is trying to keep a “discredited felony accusation on life support,” and doing so served no public interest.
“There is nothing that can save the case they dismissed,” Levin said. “The government has basically acknowledged there is nothing that can revive this case.”
But Spence said the grand jury process would still give Hearn protection from a bad faith prosecution.
“The government did act in good faith in this case,” Spence argued.
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