The Trump administration celebrated the arrival of an alleged MS-13 mastermind on American soil in March 2025.
But it was Moises Rivera-Luna — a man whom the Justice Department says ordered murders in the US from inside a Salvadoran jail cell more than a decade ago — who fell to his knees, stunned and grateful, in a Washington, DC, courtroom this April.
It was the second time in five months the Justice Department had tried him before a federal jury. And for the second time, his jury failed to reach a verdict.
Portrayed as a brutal gang leader known as “Viejo Santos,” or “Old Saint,” Rivera-Luna was squarely among the types of criminal defendants President Donald Trump and, by extension, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, has most sought to convict. But over the past year, the case against Rivera-Luna has run up against two juries in Washington that simply couldn’t agree, ending both rounds of the Justice Department’s efforts in mistrials.
“I’ve done this a long time and haven’t seen one quite like this one,” Judge Royce Lamberth, who’s been on the bench for nearly 40 years, said as the second trial neared its deadlocked end.
It’s unclear exactly what broke down during jury deliberations in both trials.
The arc of this case, though, has become unusually commonplace in the federal court in Washington this year.
Pirro’s office has secured some convictions at trial in federal court, and touted several successful prosecutions of violent crime in Washington’s local Superior Court.
Yet Pirro’s office has a jury problem. An increasingly alarming number of cases have fallen apart this year in DC’s federal court — even when the cases appear to be strong arguments against violent crime, relatively straightforward to prove, and tried by experienced prosecutors.
https://lite.cnn.com/2026/08/24/politics/trump-ms13-conviction-jeanine-pirro