Reflecting Pool case is dropped but a crucial question remains
The criminal case against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn is now officially dismissed. But there’s still a crucial question that remains open: Will the dismissal be permanent, or will the Justice Department be allowed to try to revive it in the future?
In moving to dismiss the indictment she had touted at a press conference just last month, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said her initial allegation that Hearn vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was marred by her office’s subsequent discovery that the damage to the landmark was actually due to a botched installation.
Yet even though her motion drew President Donald Trump’s ire and called her future as the District of Columbia’s top prosecutor into question, it didn’t seek a permanent dismissal. Rather, Pirro sought to drop the case “without prejudice,” meaning she moved to dismiss it in a way that would leave her free to revive the charges later.
Hearn’s lawyers that the dismissal should be “with prejudice” because of what they called “the extraordinary circumstances of this case.” They said the indictment was “motivated by political considerations and devoid of adequate factual support” from the very start, and that a permanent dismissal is needed to prevent the risk of “harassment and bad faith” by the government.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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