What Does a Grand Jury Do Anyway?
I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot about the grand jury in the coming months. Earlier this week, news broke that the U.S. Department of Justice was bringing former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff to a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia over the troubling developments surrounding the 2020 presidential election. Another grand jury with a similar goal is working in Fulton, Georgia. New York also has a special state grand jury that can decide to indict a certain former president who is not Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama.
The Justice Department is notorious for its silence, and the grand jury process is inherently secretive, so the best thing we can do right now is wait for leaks and try to read the legal coffee grounds. Understanding what a grand jury is, what a grand jury does, and how a grand jury differs from the “petty juries” that hear criminal cases is a good start. ( Note: I’m only talking about criminal grand juries and only in general—states have different laws, state courts are different from federal courts, and civil grand juries are different.)
What is a grand jury?
A criminal grand jury is a panel of ordinary citizens who meet to decide whether the state has sufficient grounds to charge a suspect with a criminal offense. Grand juries tend to be larger than criminal juries—16 to 23 people in federal court instead of the usual 12—and they meet less often, maybe once a week or a few times a month. Grand jury trials typically take longer: a federal grand jury can be formed for 18 to 36 months.
How is a grand jury trial different from a jury trial?
They are both called “juries”, but the procedures and purposes of grand juries are very different from those used by juries in criminal trials.
- Purpose : I’m sure you know that the job of a jury in a criminal case is to determine whether a suspect is guilty of a crime beyond reasonable doubt. The role of the grand jury is generally to determine whether the prosecutor has sufficient grounds to indict the suspect in the first place.
- Secrecy : Criminal cases are open to the public. Jury trials are held in secret. Usually only jurors, the court clerk, witnesses and the prosecutor are present. The public/press is not allowed to attend, so usually we only know when a grand jury is called when a witness or subject announces it.
- No Defense: No defense is presented in the grand jury. In some jurisdictions, prosecutors are required to produce certain exculpatory evidence (if it exists), but for the most part, this is their show. In doing so, the subjects of a grand jury investigation are generally notified that the proceedings are taking place and have the right to testify. However, they cannot stay around to see the evidence presented against them or respond in any way to the allegations.
- Defendant’s right to drop : A grand jury is required for all federal felonies, but the defendant can drop the entire case in favor of a pre-trial hearing where a judge determines whether there is a probable cause. However, this rarely happens in the case of white-collar workers.
- Informal : Because its purpose is an investigation, grand jury members can question witnesses and request evidence. The judge does not preside, and the prosecutor must work with the jury (they are not the head of the jury). In practice, prosecutors often use grand juries to compel witnesses to testify and release documents.
- Rules of Evidence : The rules of evidence of a “regular” trial do not apply to grand juries, so evidence can often be presented that would be inadmissible under other circumstances. As a result, a grand jury can consider a wider range of evidence than a jury in a criminal case will ever see.
- Burden of proof: If a jury in a criminal case must reach a guilty verdict only if the suspect’s guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, a grand jury can indict if there are simply reasonable grounds to believe that the suspect committed the crime. the crime they are accused of. They only need a majority to reach such a decision, instead of the unanimity usually required in a criminal case.
- Conclusion : When the grand jury has reviewed the evidence and heard the testimony, it returns either a “correct score” (i.e., “go on with the prosecution”) or “no score”, meaning that the prosecutor did not meet the standard. proof of. Unlike a verdict in a criminal trial, a prosecutor can still bring charges against a suspect after a no-count decision – usually if more evidence is found – by calling a new grand jury and reopening the process.
Why do we even have a grand jury?
The grand jury system originated in 12th century England as a defense against unfair prosecution by the monarchy. This gave citizens the right to say, “Wait a minute; You shouldn’t be dragging this person to court at all.” The felony jury requirement is listed in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution for the same reason: to protect citizens from malicious persecution. In practice, however, the grand jury is seen by many as a prosecutor’s stamp or a test for an upcoming criminal trial.
Why a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich
In a 1985 interview, former Chief Justice of New York State Saul Wachtler said that district attorneys have so much influence on a grand jury that they “will indict a ham sandwich.”
The phrase resonated for good reason: Roughly 95-99% of grand juries reach indictments, although sometimes grand juries find themselves denied, as seems to have happened in a couple of recent high-profile Justice Department investigations. don’t get too high hopes for now that you’ll see those under investigation in D.C. and Georgia marching from their mansion to a holding cell.