Lack of grand jury indictments sparks need for change

After the lack of indictments for officers in cases like Brown and Garner, the grand jury system needs reconstruction.

Lack of grand jury indictments sparks need for change

by Helen Wheatley

 

Recent grand jury rulings in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have sparked unrest in the United States as protests and riots break out across the nation.

While plenty will agree that there are numerous underlying issues in these cases, the rulings reveal another problem: the grand jury system may be a flawed way of holding police officers accountable for their actions.

The U.S. is one of the only countries to use the grand jury system, the U.K. having scrapped it in the 1930s. Grand juries are meant to weed out ill-conceived prosecutions, or in other words, cases taken to trial that have no logical argument for prosecution.

The grand jury decides whether or not there is enough evidence to bring a case to trial– they do not decide whether someone is guilty, according to The Economist. The proceedings are not public, however in some states like Missouri, Sunshine Laws allow the testimony viewed by the grand jury to be available to all civilians.

Like a judge would oversee a normal trial, the prosecuting attorney  instructs the jury on the law. Additionally, the prosecuting attorney presents the jurors with all available evidence, and testimony they believe to be presentable in trial. According to the standards for the American Bar Association, a prosecutor should recommend that the grand jury not indict if he or she believes the evidence presented does not warrant an indictment under governing law.

That being said, the prosecutor has a lot of pull in the way the grand jury views the case. As legal commentator and journalist Joshua Rosenberg said, “[Grand juries] are said to be ‘putty in the hands of the prosecutor’, meaning the prosecutor really tells them what he or she wants and they will go along with it.”

Sol Wachtler, lawyer and politician, once said, “a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if that’s what [the prosecutor] wanted.”

Police officers kill approximately 1,000 citizens per year in the line of duty. On average, four officers are indicted for causing gun-related deaths on duty every year, however keep in mind that not all of these deaths are unwarranted, according to a study by Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

If it’s so easy to get an indictment, and an indictment happens the majority of the time, why did the cases of Brown and Garner not go to trial? The issue isn’t in the lack of evidence– video recordings and eye witnesses of both should be enough. The fact that these two men died because of the actions of police officers is enough evidence

The issue comes when grand juries start to decide more than they should. The grand jury essentially claimed the killing of Brown was lawful. Their duty is not to decide whether the officer is guilty or innocent. The prosecutor’s duty is not to sway the opinions of the grand jury. The grand jury’s duty is not to let the killers of men walk free- that should be the duty of the judge and jury in a trial.

Grand juries almost always return an indictment– except when it comes to cases involving police officers. Grand juries on a state level seem to lack the capacity to deal with criminal cases. Either we strictly revise the grand jury process, or get rid of grand juries altogether.

As an alternative to the grand jury system, I propose that every case skips the grand jury and goes straight to a trial; a person may submit a formal complaint of a crime and the defendant is summoned to court. Because the grand jury almost always returns an indictment, we are taking almost every case to trial anyway. This system avoids issues we’ve had in the Brown and Garner cases, and is also a system the United Kingdom has been using successfully for over 80 years.

We may never know the reasons the grand jury decided not indict- racism, the prosecutor swaying ideas, inaccurate evidence – but just the fact that the officers in the Brown and Garner cases were not put on trial is enough to say that change in our legal system is necessary.