The Case Against Judge Dugan is Strong But Will a Jury Care About the Facts?

Shortly after Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested in Milwaukee for attempting to interfere in the arrest of a criminal illegal immigrant by federal agents, there was a general caterwauling from elected Democrats. I wrote a post cataloging some of the instant and suspiciously similar responses from Senators Tina Smith, Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders and others.

As a few more days have passed it is penetrating into some corners of the left that the case against Judge Dugan is pretty strong. What she allegedly did is a real crime. A UW-Madison political science professor named Howard Schweber appeared on PBS Wisconsin today and said as much. “Assuming everything that is alleged in the complaint is true, yeah they’ve got a pretty strong case,” Schweber said. He continued, “The ICE agents were in the public areas of the courthouse where law enforcement is permitted, by both law and tradition, to make arrests.

“It appears the judge very much went out of her way to help this guy evade arrest…So if these facts bear out and if she is convicted on the basis of the complaint as it stands…I think there would be no doubt that the state supreme court as well as the legislature would take action to remove her from the bench.”

So, assuming there are no big surprises, this could be the end of Judge Dugan’s career. Given that there were multiple witnesses to her actions, including her own clerk, it seems likely the facts are as alleged.

However, assuming we’re going to have anything like regular justice in this case is probably a mistake. That’s the conclusion of Elie Honig over at New York Magazine. Honig agrees this looks like a solid case.

Judge Dugan hardly committed the most egregious act of obstruction. I’ve worked on cases where witnesses have been murdered, evidence has been burned or flushed, jurors have been threatened, files have been deleted. The crux of Judge Dugan’s conduct was to direct and usher Flores-Ruiz out the back jury door. But her intent, as laid out in the complaint, was plain: She wanted to help him evade the federal agents who had come to arrest him — and succeeded, briefly. (Imagine how the victims of Flores-Ruiz’s attack felt, sitting in that courtroom and watching the judge cancel the scheduled proceedings and hustle him out the back door, away from arresting officers.)

Nevertheless, Honig thinks it’s exceedingly unlikely Judge Dugan will be convicted. Why not? Because Democrats want to stick it to Trump, of course.

While the complaint against Judge Dugan makes out a valid criminal charge, the odds of an ultimate conviction are minuscule. It will come as little surprise if a federal district-court judge dismisses the case, or even if a grand jury declines to indict; the politics around this case run hot, and it feels precipitous to prosecute a judge for her conduct inside her own courtroom…

If the case makes it to trial, it’ll be exceedingly difficult to convince a jury of 12 Wisconsin residents to convict Judge Dugan given the politics around the case. Wisconsin is split roughly in half; Trump won the state in 2024 by less than one percentage point. Jurors who oppose Trump or his anti-immigration policies will have a hard time putting aside their political views, no matter the actual evidence. Consider, for example, a poll posted by my CNN colleague and SiriusXM host Michael Smerconish (who has a diverse but generally moderate, centrist following). Of more than 35,000 respondents, over 51 percent said that even if a judge helps a migrant evade arrest by ICE, that judge should not be arrested and charged with obstruction. That’s an ominous indicator for prosecutors.

In other words, the same people who’ve been screaming “No one is above the law” as the various cases proceeded against Donald Trump are probably going with politicized jury nullification, if it even gets that far. 

If that is what happens here, it would be strikingly at odds with all the calls for “due process” we’re hearing from Democrats in the Abrego Garcia case. Finding an excuse give Judge Dugan a pass because you like her politics (or hate the Trump administration) is not how due process is supposed to work. 

No one is above the law! But she’s an anti-Trump Democrat so whatever.