re: Update from ferguson

Ok that makes sense. There for a minute I thought you might mean alleged victims of the victim which would've blown my mind.

How often are Grand Juries used in your state? Here there are a few crimes where they are required by law and of course, in the case of rape/sexual assault etc. prosecutors like to send it to a Grand Jury for multiple reasons, including the fact that they can avoid giving the defense any knowledge. It protects victims and allows them to keep their case very, very, close to the vest, often hindering the defense in that it reveals squat that they can use.

quote:

---

Every county in every state in the US has a serving grand jury at all times as far as I know.

---

Kinda. We don't even hear criminal cases that aren't extremely petty or ordinance violations in my county. All real criminal cases (serious misdemeanors and felonies but even DUIs) are consolidated for several counties into one spot - a county away. I don't have to worry much about jury duty given where I'm at whether it's trial or grand (technically I *can* be called for grand jury duty but the DA is several counties over and grand jury cases are rare - our service is 3-4 times for each term of the court!). We also don't even have a place to house juvenile offenders in our county.

We also don't use grand juries very often -- we have petit juries for most things as well as the distinction of investigatory grand juries that are used in some cases (those are more like the Federal Grand Jury system). However, much of the state only uses them with capital offenses and sometimes rape. They can also be used for other issues, particularly politically sensitive ones and sometimes other things but for the most part it's the DA's decision whether or not to charge and grand juries are used sparingly.

IIRC, only a few states have actually incorporated the Grand Jury Clause of the 5th Amendment.

Prof, no offense intended but you really need to learn about your state's court system. In about 5 minutes, I learned that it is pretty much identical to Alabama's in that every single felony case is presented to a grand jury. That grand jury can either indict or no-bill the case.

Where you are getting confused is that the GJ review can either be used as an investigative tool pre-arrest or it serves as a secondary review post-arrest but pre trial. Either way, there is no trial unless the GJ indicts.

Info from a random Tennessee criminal defense site

The post-arrest GJ is the most common because most cases just aren't that difficult. A prosecutor might want to go for an indictment if he isn't sure of his case because securing an indictment before arrest protects the prosecutor and police from a potential civil case. Additionally, a GJ can issue subpoenas whereas a potential witness can just tell the PD to screw off if they don't want to talk.

Tl;dnr version - Tennessee uses grand juries a whole lot more than you think,