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I was on a grand jury and we were all a very cynical bunch. They presented a bunch of cases that boiled down to "person we don't like talked back to the police

I was on a grand jury and we were all a very cynical bunch. They presented a bunch of cases that boiled down to "person we don't like talked back to the police" and our jury refused to indict them. In one case, it was painfully obvious that the police officers testifying were flat-out lying. Their story changed from sentence to sentence. I think even the prosecutor thought that continuing to prosecute this particular case would be a career killer. Eventually the ADAs caught on that our group asked too many questions, and just carefully ran out the clock on our two week grand jury session. Cases we were halfway through hearing mysteriously disappeared. Apparently the other two juries that met during our two week cycle had to stay late every day, while we got dismissed early. It's one of those things where the system is designed to be good (23 randos get to decide if the cops are full of shit before you even get indicted, and you don't have to be very smart to see that sometimes the cops are full of shit), but The System turned it into something bad for no good reason. I guess if people aren't committing felonies, we don't need assistant district attorneys, and then the people that already do that job have their career progress reset. So they are forced to play into a broken system and make up very tenuous felonies for their own personal career gain. It's sad. Someone should do something about that. (I wonder if there should be an after-the-fact non-binding review board. Look at all the cases that were prosecuted over a given year, and just have a group of experts gut-check them. If a lot of cases seem like bullshit, dock the numbers for the DA's office so they suffer at election time.)

Buttons840 5y ago
The fact that your joury went home early while others stayed late, is this information available to the defense?
- jrockway 5y ago
  Probably not. It operates as an on-call sort of thing. You show up when you're summoned and sit in a room until there are details of a case to present. You hear maybe 20 minutes of testimony for a case, sit around for 2 hours, then hear 10 minutes of another case, etc. for 8 hours a day for two weeks. At some point, there is enough evidence to vote. (I actually don't remember the exact process there. I think the ADA leaves the room, and some number of people have to vote to indict, and then we fill out a piece of paper with the results. I wasn't the person that actually filled out the paper, I was just the backup if that person was absent, which they never were.) All the grand jury members are ordinary citizens with no special education or training. The state sends you a letter, you show up at the time and place they say, and there is no "jury selection" that excludes jurors. You're truly just a pool of random people from the county. (This is the New York State system. The federal system is different. And some states don't even have grand juries. It's kind of an unusual thing.) To more directly answer what you're getting at; yes, I felt like something a little fishy was going on. It is all conjecture from chatting with the other members of the jury while sitting around bored for 8 hours a day. Some of them were very good at collecting information about what goes on behind the scenes. The cases should probably be randomly load-balanced between juries, without the prosecutor knowing that one of them has difficult people on it. I would venture a guess that there are rules around this, and then there are "the rules" on how it's done in real life, and people are generally fine with "the rules". So it goes. Ultimately, the grand jury is the people's power over prosecutorial aggression. You, as one of those people, have to decide what to push for and how the jury should be run. My group had a lot of people in it that very strongly pushed back against the power of the state. Some other groups might not have that. That's the luck of the draw, I suppose. I'll also say that we were not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. They presented some cases that were very clear-cut, and we easily agreed to indict based on the evidence that was shown.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Of course, they make it easy to indict because only the prosecutor gives the "facts" and there is noone there to rebut it. In my cases they actually failed to allege some elements of the offense in one, which would technically make it impossible to indict because you cannot say for certain if a crime was committed (but I checked and they say as long as most of the elements were alleged then it is close enough to be legal), and in both cases the police lied about which county the crime was alleged to have been committed in, so the grand jury did not know they had no legal authority to indict.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      Here's a recent example. It seems as though the Kentucky prosecutor rigged the grand jury so that they wouldn't opt to charge the police with a crime. Pretty chilling. This is the same justice system that over-charges defendants so they plead guilty even if they are innocent. Our justice department is out of control and exists to serve itself. Without faith in the law, our country is lost. Breonna Taylor grand jurors say there was an 'uproar' when they realized officers wouldn't be charged with her death https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/us/breonna-taylor-grand-jurors/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/us/breonna-taylor-grand-juror...
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Probably not. In Illinois where I am, at least, judicial matters are excluded from the Freedom of Information Act. You do have a free speech right to some judicial documents under the 1st Amendment to the federal constitution and possibly under a State constitution. The transcripts of the actual grand jury session are "secret" but generally available to the defendant's attorney, but not the public. Information on when a grand jury went home might not be restricted though, and might be available, if it was recorded somewhere.
kingcharles 5y ago
That's an interesting report because I've seen statistics [citation required] that Grand Juries vote to indict in 99.9% of cases. I was locked up for 8 years in a county jail and I only saw one instance where the grand jury did not return a "true bill", and the Constitution in that case then allows the prosecutor a second chance by then doing a prelminary hearing in front of the judge instead. At which point the judge immediately found probable cause. The case was that someone said they had seen, from the street, the suspect walking around in his basement with a gun in his hand. They called the police. 47 officers arrived at the house, but the suspect had left earlier. They found him several blocks from the house with no firearm on him and arrested him for Unlawful Use or Possession of a Firearm by a Felon (he had a previous conviction from years prior). The judge took pity on him and offered to let him plead to Attempted Possession of a Firearm to get him to plead guilty, which he did and only had to do 6 months in prison for a crime he didn't actually commit. (It was shown that it was impossible to see into the basement from where the reporting citizen was stood.)
- jrockway 5y ago
  I think that some care should be taken on statistics like "99.9% indictment rate". If you can control the number of cases in the denominator, then you can make it match the numerator. (I'm implying that if the grand jury is looking bad, you can close the case before they indict.) In that case, anything not equal to 100% just tells you that someone doesn't know how to play the numbers game... and in 2021, EVERYONE knows how to play the numbers game.

Buttons840 5y ago

The fact that your joury went home early while others stayed late, is this information available to the defense?

jrockway 5y ago
Probably not. It operates as an on-call sort of thing. You show up when you're summoned and sit in a room until there are details of a case to present. You hear maybe 20 minutes of testimony for a case, sit around for 2 hours, then hear 10 minutes of another case, etc. for 8 hours a day for two weeks. At some point, there is enough evidence to vote. (I actually don't remember the exact process there. I think the ADA leaves the room, and some number of people have to vote to indict, and then we fill out a piece of paper with the results. I wasn't the person that actually filled out the paper, I was just the backup if that person was absent, which they never were.) All the grand jury members are ordinary citizens with no special education or training. The state sends you a letter, you show up at the time and place they say, and there is no "jury selection" that excludes jurors. You're truly just a pool of random people from the county. (This is the New York State system. The federal system is different. And some states don't even have grand juries. It's kind of an unusual thing.) To more directly answer what you're getting at; yes, I felt like something a little fishy was going on. It is all conjecture from chatting with the other members of the jury while sitting around bored for 8 hours a day. Some of them were very good at collecting information about what goes on behind the scenes. The cases should probably be randomly load-balanced between juries, without the prosecutor knowing that one of them has difficult people on it. I would venture a guess that there are rules around this, and then there are "the rules" on how it's done in real life, and people are generally fine with "the rules". So it goes. Ultimately, the grand jury is the people's power over prosecutorial aggression. You, as one of those people, have to decide what to push for and how the jury should be run. My group had a lot of people in it that very strongly pushed back against the power of the state. Some other groups might not have that. That's the luck of the draw, I suppose. I'll also say that we were not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. They presented some cases that were very clear-cut, and we easily agreed to indict based on the evidence that was shown.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Of course, they make it easy to indict because only the prosecutor gives the "facts" and there is noone there to rebut it. In my cases they actually failed to allege some elements of the offense in one, which would technically make it impossible to indict because you cannot say for certain if a crime was committed (but I checked and they say as long as most of the elements were alleged then it is close enough to be legal), and in both cases the police lied about which county the crime was alleged to have been committed in, so the grand jury did not know they had no legal authority to indict.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    Here's a recent example. It seems as though the Kentucky prosecutor rigged the grand jury so that they wouldn't opt to charge the police with a crime. Pretty chilling. This is the same justice system that over-charges defendants so they plead guilty even if they are innocent. Our justice department is out of control and exists to serve itself. Without faith in the law, our country is lost. Breonna Taylor grand jurors say there was an 'uproar' when they realized officers wouldn't be charged with her death https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/us/breonna-taylor-grand-jurors/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/us/breonna-taylor-grand-juror...
kingcharles 5y ago
Probably not. In Illinois where I am, at least, judicial matters are excluded from the Freedom of Information Act. You do have a free speech right to some judicial documents under the 1st Amendment to the federal constitution and possibly under a State constitution. The transcripts of the actual grand jury session are "secret" but generally available to the defendant's attorney, but not the public. Information on when a grand jury went home might not be restricted though, and might be available, if it was recorded somewhere.

kingcharles 5y ago

That's an interesting report because I've seen statistics [citation required] that Grand Juries vote to indict in 99.9% of cases. I was locked up for 8 years in a county jail and I only saw one instance where the grand jury did not return a "true bill", and the Constitution in that case then allows the prosecutor a second chance by then doing a prelminary hearing in front of the judge instead. At which point the judge immediately found probable cause. The case was that someone said they had seen, from the street, the suspect walking around in his basement with a gun in his hand. They called the police. 47 officers arrived at the house, but the suspect had left earlier. They found him several blocks from the house with no firearm on him and arrested him for Unlawful Use or Possession of a Firearm by a Felon (he had a previous conviction from years prior). The judge took pity on him and offered to let him plead to Attempted Possession of a Firearm to get him to plead guilty, which he did and only had to do 6 months in prison for a crime he didn't actually commit. (It was shown that it was impossible to see into the basement from where the reporting citizen was stood.)

jrockway 5y ago
I think that some care should be taken on statistics like "99.9% indictment rate". If you can control the number of cases in the denominator, then you can make it match the numerator. (I'm implying that if the grand jury is looking bad, you can close the case before they indict.) In that case, anything not equal to 100% just tells you that someone doesn't know how to play the numbers game... and in 2021, EVERYONE knows how to play the numbers game.