Have you even been on a grand jury?

I’m in the midst of my first grand jury experience and I’m curious about the process in other jurisdictions. I know the proceedings are secret, but I’d like to know how it works where you are.

I’m in Maryland, specifically in St. Mary’s County. Grand jury duty is for a period of 6 months, roughly bi-weekly on Wednesdays. We have our own little sequestered area of the courthouse. You enter a small vestibule where the coffee, donuts, and bailiff are kept. On the far right is a small room where the State’s attorney and police will wait their turn to present their cases to us. Just to the left of that is the door to the big room where we deliberate. It’s like a large conference room with a table, lots of chairs around the perimeter, and a chalk board. At the far end of the room is a door that opens to a hallway from which one can access the rest rooms or, going around to the left, it leads back to the vestibule. For the record, they get some goooooood donuts!

On our first day, a rep from the State’s Attorney Office came in and explained how Maryland’s judicial process works. He also threw in some stuff about the Magna Carta and TV shows. The main thing he emphasized is that our deliberations are secret.

A typical session lasts several hours. Each case is presented by a prosecutor and the police officer/detective in charge of the investigation. They read the charges, describe the evidence, answer any questions we have, then they leave the room. We may or may not discuss the case, then we vote whether or not to indict. The foreman and the secretary sign the indictment, and they give it to the bailiff. Then the next pair come in.

To my mind, it’s better than a jury trial, because we can ask questions. And in our last session, the prosecutor was actually asking our advice and suggestions for presenting the case, since it was rather complex and she figured if we were confused, the petit jury would probably be confused also.

If I can say anything negative about the experience, I’ve learned about some of the skeevy people that live in my county. On the other hand, most of them are pretty stupid. I mean, really - when a police officer comes to your place of business and asks to speak with you, it’s probably not too bright to say “Oh, this is about that murder, isn’t it?”

When we’ve heard all the cases for the day, we go to one of the courtrooms and the indictments are presented to the judge. We are thanked and dismissed. And for all of this, we get and expense check of $15 each session. I give mine back as a donation to a children’s camp fund, since I’m gainfully employed and the $15 isn’t needed or missed.

So, care to share your experiences?

Basically the same thing, 6 months, $15 a session. We only met once a month, but had a pretty full day each time. All types of law enforcement witnesses, I don’t recall any non-LEO witnesses during my stint, but I’ve had to testify in front of a grand jury so I know that is a possibility.

I liked it, every session was such a variety of different offences, many that were surprising, many mundane (lots of 3rd DWI-felony).

The assistant DA that did almost all of the presentations was smoking hot and had been married to a guy I went to school with (and used to party fairly hardy with). It was worth it to see her dig into her files.

We weren’t a rubber stamp, we asked a lot of questions, questioned the evidence, and no-billed several cases.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Talk about dirty laundry, whew! and this is a fairly small district.

Most of the things we’ve heard so far are mundane also - lots of drug-dealing concentrated in a fairly tight area of the county, plus miscellaneous assaults, burglaries, robberies, and drunken misbehaviors. I’m fairly new here (just over 3 years) so most of the names don’t mean anything, but I expect for long-time residents, there’s the reaction of “Hey, I knew his daddy’s barber!” or some such. And of all of the cases presented, there was only one that I recall happening, but it was a pretty spectacular crime.

One thing that cracks me up - when fellow jurors ask questions of the prosecutor/officer, one of the most frequent answers is “It isn’t like on television.” Good fingerprint evidence is rare, and DNA workups take months to come back from the lab somewhere upstate. I bet attornies hate having clients or witnesses who watch too much CSI or L&O!

I did grand jury in Manhattan back around 2000 or '01; it wasn’t for anything akin to a 6 month stint (whew!), more like six weeks IIRC. It was during the day for half-days and not every day of the week, but it did mean missing a chunk of work.

Ours was a special GJ session devoted to drug cases, maybe that had something to do with it.

We were fairly hard on the prosecutors (compared to a rumored attitude of “it’s only an grand jury, they’ll get a chance to show they’re not guilty at trial, they must’ve had some reason for bringing this case against them, let’s respect the cops” that was sometimes prevalent): you want an indictment, give us some probable cause. “Well, he could’ve had it in order to sell it” isn’t sufficient for “intent to sell”. On the other hand, we were pretty fair about indicting folks even when the prevailing attitude was “why is that a crime” — while most of the charges were cocaine, heroin, etc, there were a couple that were simply marijuana possession — if they had sufficient support for the charges. Letter of the law and all that.

It was kind of fun. There was down-time, sometimes several hours when they simply didn’t have anything for us. I brought my PowerBook and watched DVDs :slight_smile:

I saw a newpaper story to that effect a while ago, that CSI and such is giving the public unreasonable expectations of what can be done with forensics. I couldn’t find that article, but here’s one where a forensics person complains that even the investigators are getting unreasonable expectations.

My posts from last December, on a different board. I’m sasuming it’s kosher for me to quote my own posts (an no one else’s):

We were never sent the promised letter saying that we were now released. I assumed that we were when I read in the paper about the outcome of the case we’d been held over for.

I was on the Civil Grand Jury.

Do not, whatever the DA sez, indite that ham sandwich. :stuck_out_tongue: