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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

Because that's how you get a felony criminal case started in Ohio (and most, if not all, states and any federal felony cases).

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The simplest reason the indictment failed is that a felony charge amounts to overcharging in this case. Go one layer deeper and you find that cops and prosecutors assume the public likes a "tough on crime" approach, even when a lot of the public think Flock has bought off their local officials to pay Flock to run obnoxious surveillance tools with tax money.

Public attitudes may be changing. At least for Federal cases, it is quite rare for a grand jury to return a "no bill" or refuse to indict. Presumably, because federal prosecutors normally have their ducks in a row and present a strong case, or if they don't have a strong case, they don't waste time even bringing it to a grand jury.

However, per Wikipedia, "Beginning in late 2025, legal observers documented a marked increase in no-bill decisions in federal cases, particularly in matters arising from protest-related activity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury#cite_note-37

Yeah, feels like two things contributing there... 1 - Trump fired many of the good prosecutors. Or made life miserable enough those prosecutors left the job for better paying private sector gigs.

2 - Trump has propensity to sue or charge anything that moves. "Boy who cried wolf" problem. See also: arresting people for taking peeling paint out of the reflecting pool, even when his own DoJ says it was a botched installation.

Yeah I'm not sure this is public attitudes so much as creeping incompetence from recent political appointments, at least at the federal level.

However that doesn't explain Ohio doing it as neatly, unless I've missed some local politics there.

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