Grand Jury
 Grand Jury    | |
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| US legal concept. Because the targets of the grand jury or their lawyers have no right to appear before a grand jury unless they are invited, a running joke in the legal profession that a grand jury could "indict a ham sandwich" if the prosecutor asked. |
A Grand Jury is a jury – a group of citizens – empowered by law to conduct legal proceedings and investigate potential criminal conduct, and determine whether criminal charges should be brought. A Grand Jury may subpoena physical evidence or a person to testify. A Grand Jury is separate from the courts, which do not preside over its functioning.[1]
The Grand Jury is so named because traditionally it has more jurors than a trial jury, sometimes called a petit jury (from the French word petit meaning "small").[2]
The United States and Liberia are the only countries that retain grand juries,[3][4] though other common law jurisdictions formerly employed them, and most others now employ a different procedure that doesn't involve a jury: a preliminary hearing. Grand Juries perform both accusatory and investigatory functions. The investigatory functions of Grand Juries include obtaining and reviewing documents and other evidence, and hearing sworn testimonies of witnesses who appear before it; the accusatory function determines whether there is probable cause to believe that one or more persons committed a certain offence within the venue of a district court.
The US Constitution plus decades of judicial precedent have endowed grand juries with legal superpowers. The Supreme Court has ruled[5] that a grand jury "does not depend on a case or controversy for power to get evidence, but can investigate merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even just because it wants assurance that it is not." In another case[6], the court held that a grand jury can operate independently of "questions of propriety or forecasts of probable results" and elsewhere[7] that a grand jury investigation isn't complete "until every available clue has been run down and all witnesses examined in every proper way to find if a crime has been committed."
An American federal grand jury has from 16 to 23 jurors, with twelve votes required to return an indictment. All grand jury proceedings are conducted behind closed doors, without a presiding judge. The prosecutors are tasked with arranging for the appearance of witnesses, as well as drafting the order in which they are called, and take part in the questioning of witnesses.[8] The targets of the grand jury or their lawyers have no right to appear before a grand jury unless they are invited, nor do they have a right to present exculpatory evidence.[8] Possibly as a result, there is a running joke in the legal profession that a grand jury could "indict a ham sandwich" if the prosecutor asked.[9] Some sources state the joke originated from a quote by Sol Wachtler in 1985,[10] but it is found in a newspaper article from 1979, attributed to an unnamed "Rochester defense lawyer".[11]
References
- ↑ https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/504/36
- ↑ A Law Dictionary by Henry Campbell Black 2nd ed, publ. by West, St Paul, Minnesota,1910. Entry for Grand Jury
- ↑ "UNITED STATES, Petitioner v. John H. WILLIAMS, Jr". LII / Legal Information Institute.
- ↑ Nestmann, Mark (2011). The Lifeboat Strategy. The Nestmann Group. p. 110.
- ↑ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/338/632/case.html
- ↑ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/250/273/case.html
- ↑ https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/408/665
- ↑ a b https://fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/R45456.pdf
- ↑ {https://www.wsj.com/articles/indict-a-ham-sandwich-remains-on-the-menu-for-judges-prosecutors-1527863063 quote=There’s a facetious saying in legal circles about the ease with which prosecutors can secure indictments in grand jury cases: You can get a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich."
- ↑ https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/sol-wachtler-the-judge-who-coined-indict-a-ham-sandwich-was-himself-indicted.html
- ↑ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/55683263/indict-a-ham-sandwich-1979/
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