The laws written to protect us are being used against us.

Part one

When the government is wrong, it costs the government nothing.

This is not a claim about anyone’s motive. It is a claim about consequence, and it is written into the rules.

A federal jury was told that Elizabeth Hernandez had to prove she acted in good faith. That is backwards — the government has to prove she did not. On 31 July 2026 the Eleventh Circuit agreed the instruction was wrong, and called the error harmless. The same court found the trial judge gave the government forty minutes to deliver its closing argument and gave her thirty, and called that harmless too.¹

She is serving twenty years.

Now run it the other way. When a defendant is the one who misleads a court, the sentencing guidelines add levels for obstruction of justice and the sentence goes up by years. There is no provision running in the opposite direction. No enhancement. No remedy. No name in any report.

Their errors are harmless. Ours are not.

What the Department records about itself

In fiscal year 2022 the Department’s own Office of Professional Responsibility processed 397 matters and found professional misconduct in fourteen of them.² Fourteen findings against Department attorneys, in writing, by the Department. No attorney was named in any of those reports.

Separately, and in a different decade, the Government Accountability Office examined how the Department disciplines its attorneys. It found the Department could not confirm that attorneys found to have committed misconduct actually served the discipline imposed on them.³ Not that the discipline was light. That there is no record it occurred.

Those are two separate findings, years apart. GAO did not review the 2022 matters, and we do not claim it did.

A federal judge asked the question out loud

On 18 November 2025 a federal district judge asked the government why one case had sat for six years while comparable cases were charged and tried. Was this one weaker than those? Counsel said yes, and that it went without saying — it would have been charged otherwise. The judge cut in: “No, I think it has to be said. That’s the whole point.” The government had separately argued in writing that it may pick a defendant based partly on the deterrent effect on other people. That argument is lawful. No court ever reached it.⁴

And there is almost nothing to recover

The one statute Congress wrote to repay a wrongly prosecuted defendant, the Hyde Amendment, requires showing the government’s position was vexatious, frivolous, or brought in bad faith — a state of mind. Compensation for an unjust conviction requires a court-issued certificate of innocence. A prosecutor carries absolute immunity, so the question of good faith is never reached at all.⁵

Every review available to us happens inside the institution being reviewed, by people who report to it, under standards the Department itself could not confirm were enforced.

We know what that is like from the other end. Every one of us has been told to trust a process that answers to nobody, and has watched it answer to nobody.

A system cannot be the judge of its own conduct. That is why we are asking someone outside it to look.

Part two

The government has already said some of these went wrong. The record still says otherwise.

Not us. It.

• 7 April 2025 · a policy the prosecution outran The Deputy Attorney General issued a memorandum titled “Ending Regulation by Prosecution,” directing federal prosecutors not to charge unlicensed money transmitting in digital-asset cases. Four months later Roman Storm, one of the forty-three, was convicted of exactly that. He faces retrial.⁶
• January 2025 · dismissed with prejudice Dr. Eithan Haim, one of the forty-three, was a surgical resident at Baylor College of Medicine and the source for reporting that Texas Children’s Hospital had continued its pediatric gender medicine program after announcing it had stopped. He was indicted on four felony counts of criminal HIPAA violation and faced up to ten years. The indictment was sealed, so he and his lawyers did not know what the charges rested on. In January 2025 Judge David Hittner of the Southern District of Texas dismissed every count with prejudice, meaning the government can never bring them again. He testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee that April.⁷
• 12 July 2025 · dismissed on the fifth day of trial Dr. Michael Kirk Moore, one of the forty-three, is a Utah plastic surgeon who was indicted in January 2023 and faced up to 35 years. The government alleged he distributed at least 1,937 fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination cards, destroyed more than $28,000 in government-supplied vaccine, and gave saline shots to minors at their parents’ request — we state that plainly because a reader should have it from us. His trial was under way in Salt Lake City when the Attorney General ordered the case dismissed, and the Acting U.S. Attorney filed the motion citing the interests of justice. Moore estimates he lost about two-thirds of his practice, because the money that would have marketed it paid his lawyers.⁸
• Two full pardons Jeremy Hutchinson, May 2025. Mike McMahon — a retired NYPD sergeant who was at the towers on 11 September — November 2025. The Second Circuit vacated McMahon’s conviction the following year.⁹

Five of the forty-three. A judge ended one permanently. An Attorney General ended another in the middle of a trial. A President ended two more with a signature. Every one of them an official act, on the record, by the government itself.

Not one of them got their years back, their savings back, or their name back.

Still online

The Justice Manual instructs that a press release issued before a finding of guilt should say the charge is only an accusation and that the defendant is presumed innocent.¹⁰ It says nothing about what happens afterward. There is no correction policy. There is nobody to ask.

So the announcement outlives the case. The Department’s page for Angelica Pacheco still lists charges that were dismissed before trial, still offers the thrown-out indictment for download, and still asks for victim impact statements. It was last updated two and a half months after the case ended.¹¹

The accusation is permanent. The correction was never written.