EXCLUSIVE — A trainer at a recent Washington, D.C., jury nullification workshop presented attendees with a hypothetical assignment: They had been summoned for jury duty, and their first objective was to make it through the selection process and answer questions about potential bias.“We want to be on the jury,” the trainer said. “We want to answer ‘no.’ We want to be neutral. We want to be unbiased — as much as we can present ourselves in that way.”That first meant avoiding clothing that could reveal the prospective jurors’ political affiliations.
“Do not go in there with any Free DC shirts, any Black Lives Matter, any type of paraphernalia — none of it,” Qiana Johnson, a co-founder of the prison abolitionist group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, told a small group of attendees at a Wednesday night training session in August. “You have any visible tattoos that may say ‘Free DC’ or something, cover it up.”“You want to be Switzerland. You want to be as neutral as possible,” Johnson said, adding that they do not “want to get kicked off by either side,” referring to the prosecution and the defense.Attendees gather for Free DC and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams’s juror education training in Washington, D.C.’s Congress Heights neighborhood on Aug. 12, 2026. (Credit Kaelan Deese/Washington Examiner)
