TRIAL AND ERROR

Judge Jeanine’s ‘Embarrassing’ Record Exposed as Cases Crumble

The former Fox News host’s jury conviction rate is way below the national average.

Legal experts have raised concerns about the number of federal cases that have failed to secure a conviction in D.C. under U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

CNN analysis has laid bare how much Pirro’s office has an “embarrassing” jury problem, with cases frequently falling apart once they reach trial.

While federal juries typically convict defendants in criminal trials around 90 percent of the time nationwide, the conviction rate for the former Fox News host’s office is well below this figure.

This includes juries in both December 2025 and April 2026 trials failing to reach a decision against alleged MS-13 gang member Moises Rivera-Luna, who is accused of ordering murders in the U.S. from inside a Salvadoran jail cell between 2008 and 2010.

Before the second trial against Rivera-Luna was declared a mistrial, Pirro’s office had secured only four convictions in the eight federal cases tried before D.C. juries since January.

Since then, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has tried nearly a dozen more criminal cases in D.C.’s federal court with limited success. In two cases, the defendants were acquitted, while four others were declared mistrials after juries failed to reach a decision.

More than two dozen legal experts, former prosecutors, investigators, and defense attorneys told CNN that Pirro’s poor track record in achieving convictions is unheard of. Other legal experts described the trend with D.C. juries in federal court as “embarrassing” and dire.

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The report arrives as Pirro faces scrutiny for bringing charges against former Olympian David Hearn, who had been accused of sabotaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, before announcing an embarrassing U-turn after admitting there was no evidence the pool had been vandalized.

Instead, Pirro’s office announced that the damage to the pool’s lining was actually the result of the “rushed and flawed” installation work of a contractor hired to carry out President Donald Trump’s renovation project.

The decision enraged the president, who is still pushing the false claim that vandals targeted the reflecting pool, and accused Pirro of “folding like an umbrella” by dropping the case.

There was also talk that Trump could even fire Pirro for embarrassing him by dropping the sham vandalism case.

In response, Pirro has taken several desperate moves to try to stay in Trump’s good books. This includes aggressively trying to keep an alleged World War II memorial vandal in jail during pretrial proceedings in a case that has caught the president’s attention.

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While the Hearn case never went to trial, CNN notes that Pirro’s office has failed to secure a conviction even in violent crime and conspiracy cases that are “relatively straightforward” to prove.

“These cases come with a playbook,” Christopher Davis, the defense attorney for a cooperating witness in the mistrialed MS-13 case, told CNN. “It’s hard to screw up these cases.”

Another trial involving Rivera-Luna and fellow alleged MS-13 leader Tokiro Rodas Ramirez is set to begin in mid-September.

The Daily Beast has contacted Pirro’s office for comment.

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