The Casey Anthony case makes me think there’s a serious flaw in the logic upon which our forefathers built the judicial system. If a grand jury decides there is enough evidence to bring a case to trial, then by defacto, it seems to me any circumstantial argument doesn’t hold water.
Factual Question: Are the findings (i.e. the official records) of the Grand Jury ever entered as evidence or otherwise submitted for consideration by the Petit Jury? Seems to me this should carry weight at the trial; otherwise, it is a shame to lose that knowledge base.
You are missing the distinction between Grand and Petit (trial) Juries. A Grand Jury’s duty is to determine if there is sufficient evidence to bind a felony case over for trial. A Petit Jury is to convict only if there is evidence proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The standard of evidence for returning a true bill is markedly lower than the beyond reasonable doubt level – the idea is to eliminate only those cases for which there is no worthwhile evidence.
The defense has no opportunity to make a case in front of a grand jury. It is the prosecutor’s arguments only. The entire logic of our criminal system is that the petit jury is an absolute necessity because it it the only official venue in which both sides are equal and the government cannot (theoretically) railroad its opponents.
You really haven’t heard the famous phrase about grand juries?
You cannot understand anything about our court system without understanding this fundamental point.
A Grand Jury either votes to indict the defendant(s) or votes a No True Bill and the case is dismissed. (They can also vote to return the case to a lower court or have it removed to Family Court if the defendant is a child.) The court reporter is not present in the room while the Grand Jury is deliberating, so there would be no “evidence” to submit. The Grand Jury only has to decide that the evidence presented is enough to go to trial and that there is (quoting from my Grand Juror handbook from when I served earlier this year) “reasonable cause to believe that the accused person committed the crime.” Usually the defendant does not testify (they can if they would like, but not testifying is not to be held against them. When I served I saw three defendants testify.), so the Grand Jury hears only from the prosecution.
There’s no knowledge base there. The Grand Jury just says “Yes there is enough evidence here to bring a trial against the accused.” That’s it.
I hope y’all don’t mind if I rephrase the OP: If the Grand Jury’s job is to determine that there is enough evidence here to bring a trial, regardless of whether or not there is enough evidence to win that trial, then why bother?
Or phrase it this way: If the prosecutor thinks there is enough evidence to go to trial, why isn’t that enough? It seems like such a waste of time to have a jury hearing only one side of the story!
I get it. If there’s enough evidence for a trial, then why doesn’t that mean that the evidence isn’t circumstantial? If the grand jury will just go to trial over anything, why have them at all?
The grand jury is, as far as I know, unique to the U.S. legal system, having been abandoned centuries ago in other common law jurisdictions. Elsewhere, the decision to prosecute is made by the police or by the prosecutors working for the state (or Crown) – and they are going to prosecute generally if they feel that there is enough evidence for a jury (or a judge) to convict. I don’t really see what purpose the grand jury serves: the interests of the accused should be protected by the petit jury.
There seems to be the assumption in the OP (and as re-stated by BigT that a conviction can’t be based on circumstantial evidence. That’s not the case. Circumstantial evidence has its weaknesses, but it can be used in a court proceeding and can be the basis for a criminal conviction.
There are two issues being conflated here, I think. One is the OP’s question: why did the grand jury find there was enough evidence to indict Casey Anthony but the trial jury found there was not enough evidence to convict. This happens all of the time, and it’s simply because there are different standards for each step of the process.
The other is why the US bothers with a Grand Jury system if indictments are obtained so easily. First, despite the oft repeated statement that you could indict a ham sandwich, grand juries return a no bill all the time. The idea that they simply rubber stamp the prosecutor is ridiculous. Maybe other who have served on a GJ can chime in.
I find it ironic that people who are unhappy with a verdict claim it’s evidence of a system that doesn’t work. In the Anthony case, legal scholars (as opposed to hysterical hosts of tabloid crime shows) were not surprised by the outcome of the Anthony case at all, and see it as evidence that the system worked the way it is supposed to.
The purpose of the two juries is to keep the hand of the layman in for szome degree of control on what is otherwise the province of the professionals – law enforcement, judiciary, prosecutory and trial lawyers. “You’re going to jail, and I’m going to lunch” is not an acceptable outcome. A competent professional DA will, >90% of the time, get true bills on virtually every indictment he seeks – but it’s the other few percent that matter: The DA out to “get tough on crime” who seeks felony prosecutions against petty offenses, who turns a blind eye to offe3nses within the “good old boy network” – the grand jury can act to right those wrongs.
By the way, it’s not “for centuries” – England abolished the grand jury in 1933, New Zealand in 1984. The last holdout outside the US, Victoria, only ended the right to empanel a grand jury in 2009.
And frankly I think it’s a mistake to eliminate it.
Grand juries are required in Federal criminal cases by the Fifth Amendment. States aren’t required to have them, and some, such as Indiana, don’t anymore. We have them here in Ohio, but I don’t think they’re worth the trouble. Grand juries are simply investigative tools of the prosecutor 99.9999999% of the time, and it would be cheaper and less of an imposition on potential grand jurors’ time (they serve for months) if we adopted Indiana’s approach and just had direct indictment by the prosecutor. Defendants would still be entitled to a trial by jury, of course.
I served in February (every day for the entire month) and it really did seem mostly pointless. Though I did find the whole thing fascinating. We saw about 60 cases, and in only one instance did we not return a True Bill. The case was not dismissed however, because due to the case being continued for several days and people’s absences, we did not have the required majority to vote either way. (I think it came down to 9-7 in the end.) And IMO the votes in that case were based more on race than on the actual facts.
In Ohio and New York, at least, prosecutors who get a no bill from one grand jury are free to present the case to as many other grand juries as they wish until they get an indictment. It happens.
The idea is one extra layer of protection where regular citizens can thwart a would-be tyrannical government. Let’s say that you were outspoken against The Powers That Be, so they decide to arrest you on a bogus rape charge and the judge (who is in on it) denies you bond.
You could sit in jail for a couple of years until your trial came up. However, the grand jury is there to look at it and say, “Hey, this is crap. There is no evidence here!” and let you go home.
Very theoretically. If the decks are that stacked against you in your hypothetical crooked city or county, the grand jury is extremely unlikely to be a shining bulwark of liberty.
I served on a grand jury last year, and found it fascinating. I also believe it is very necessary. We were there as a screen to be sure that cases without basis in fact did not even get to trial. I think it probably also gave the prosecution a hint about how a group of random folks would react to their evidence. Since we could ask questions, they could see what points could be areas of contention or confusion.
We definitely returned some no-bills. In one case I think the prosecutor was a bit annoyed because she thought the accused was right in the cross-hairs but we disagreed and there was nothing she could do about it. In another case, we not only gave a no-bill, but as a side note suggested to the prosecutor that there was another person involved that should have been charged with something else. He thought about it for a minute and agreed that we might have something there, and said he’d bring it to his boss.
We were told that anything said in the grand jury was forever confidential. (Otherwise I’d offer more detail about the cases above.) A judge told us that this was for two purposes: First, it kept people who might be involved from fleeing the jurisdiction before they could be apprehended; second, it prevented people’s reputations from being unfairly besmirched. So in the cases where we returned a no bill, the case was over and there was no record that could be held against the accused.
It was also interesting to me that in grand jury proceedings, there is no judge. There is a representative from the court to take care of reporting the results, and there are the prosecutors and their witnesses. We had a jury foreperson appointed by the judge who conducted the proceedings.
We went in once a week for 4 months. There were several more people on the GJ than were required for a quorum, so there was no problem if you had a previously-scheduled conflict, became ill during that time, etc. Every day we got from two or three to up to a dozen cases to consider. Many were over and done in 10 minutes. Prosecution would read the charges and relevant excerpts from the laws. Witnesses (almost always detectives, patrol officers, etc.) would relate what they observed or had reported to them from other officers or detectives. Sometimes they brought in video tapes or other evidence. Usually within a few minutes we could see that they had “done their homework” and were justified in proceeding. But there were a few times where we had many questions, and on one of the no-true-bill items we vigorously disputed it among ourselves for quite some time. Incidentally, the prosecutors don’t get to hear the GJ discussions.
The problem I have is this: Yes, you do throw out some cases where the police had not done their homework. But there are other cases that ought to be thrown out, because the defense has a simple and reasonable explanation.
So my idea is that we should either get rid of the grand jury system entirely, or modify it so that the grand jury hears both sides of the story. I do not recall any posting in this thread which offers a reason for excluding the defense from these proceedings.
Because that’s what the trial is for. The point of the grand jury is to establish that there is sufficient reason to proceed to trial. It’s the second step of a five step process (arrest, indict, convict, sentence, appeal), and there’s no role for defense in the first step, either.
In systems that don’t have a grand jury (basically, everywhere outside of the US). there is some sort of preliminary hearing where the prosecutor presents evidence to a judge that there is reason to hold the defendant for a trial. Unless I’m mistaken, none of them allow the defendant to offer rebuttal or present evidence.