For the less-in-the-know folks out there (read: ignoramuses), lets try once more to explain what a grand jury is and how it functions in our criminal justice system: The Founding Fathers included grand juries in the U.S. Constitutions Bill of Rights as a protection of citizens from the government bringing wildly unpopular prosecutions. Thats why the federal government still uses them -- and a big reason that roughly half the states use grand juries in some form. Since the 18th century, however, things have changed. Because the grand jury hears only what prosecutors want it to hear, it no longer functions as a meaningful check on their authority. According to the maxim, prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich if they really want to do it. Protection from wrongful prosecution now belongs to the stage of the jury trial, not the grand jury. Thats why it was so strange for the prosecutors in Ferguson case to announce that they were going to present evidence to the grand jury and then let it make up its own mind. Prosecutors never treat the grand jury that way. They present a case to the grand jury only if they are actively seeking to prosecute -- then they show the jury the prosecution’s side of the case, and direct the jury to indict if there is probable cause to go forward. The St. Louis County prosecutors were trying to be clever, repurposing an ancient institution for the contemporary political situation. They seemed to think that, because the grand jury members are drawn from the public, they would create public validation for whatever outcome the grand jury reached. Yet public validation of ordinary jury trials depends on the public having heard the evidence. The Constitution provides that criminal trials be held publicly, precisely so that the citizenry knows whats going on. Grand jury proceedings are held in secret. That mustve appealed to St. Louis County prosecutors, who sought to avoid a media circus. But releasing a summary of the grand jury transcripts afterward is a far cry from a public trial. Secret evidence was unlikely to produce public validation -- as, in fact, it did not. To make matters worse, the American public understands that a jury must convict beyond reasonable doubt, and that as a result, some guilty defendants are inevitably acquitted. We might not always like it, as the Rodney King verdict reminds us. But at least we understand the rules of the game. The grand jury, on the other hand, is supposed to present a true bill based on probable cause. The standard is so low that a grand jury refusing to go forward is essentially saying that there was no plausible basis for the case in the first place. Not having seen the evidence, we the public unsurprisingly find it shocking that the shooting of an unarmed man by a police officer should not give rise to at least the probability of a crime.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 22:08:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015