5 ms·

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.

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.