The common refrain is "you can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich". The standards required to indict are quite low. The fact that they failed to get an indictment here must mean they had ~nothing.

Would this still be jury nullification in a social/political sense? That is to say: since it's well known that getting a indictment is very easy, this seems that, like jury nullification, this represents society effectively saying that they don't recognize the validity of a law.

Of course like we said, we can't know for sure. Maybe the prosecutor messed up jury selection or failed to present compelling evidence.

If what the rest of the thread is saying is true (failed indictments being rare and harmful for the career of the prosecutor), the possibility of bringing the case up again seems relatively unlikely, making this de facto jury nullification.

> There are several variants here, one is "dismissed with prejudice", which means that those specific charges cannot be applied again. TFA doesn't note this (or indeed much else of substance in this case), so the presumption is that charges are dismissed without prejudice.

Grand juries can't dismiss with prejudice, FWIW. That's a role for judges, but a judge wouldn't have seen the case at this stage to issue such a dismissal. "Charges were dismissed" in the article is likely reference to the actions of the grand jury. It's possibly an inartful way of saying "the charges were dropped by the prosecution."