Re: Grand Jury reports are exercise in futility:
I can’t agree more - your grand jury work is an “exercise in futility”. The grand jury system, central to our constitutional law and the history of this nation, has become a farce that wastes the time of the good people who serve and mocks the purposes for which it was created.
In colonial America the grand jury was a vigorous instrument to protect the citizen from the abuses of power and to act as a ‘check and balance’ between accusation and criminal charge. The American grand jury’s central purpose was to question, in fact, to challenge, the evidence put before it, thereby insuring the validity of prosecutions. They did so understanding that while they heard time and again about alleged evil, they were hearing only one side of the story and they stood ready to act as a bulk ward, where necessary, to prevent wrongful prosecutions among the many rightful ones.
Fast forward to today and to the Final Report of the Regular Hamilton Grand Jury. Among your countless criticisms of the hardworking judges, assistant district attorneys, and defense lawyers who actually do, day in and day out, what you purport after 120 days to understand - who are really the only heroes in your saga? Does it just so happen that they are the same people who testified regularly, repeatedly before you? The same people you unabashedly praise in your report? The same people who told you their stories and who shaped your view of the system from their own, not quite unbiased, perspective? Wait, but wasn’t your job to hear, no, to examine, evidence?
So tell me - your extensive criticism of the rest of the criminal justice system aside - in your four months and in those hundreds of cases you heard, how’d you do your job of testing the evidence? For example, how many ‘no bills’ did you return? Wow. Life must be simple when there’s only one right answer.
Benjamin L. McGowan