I spent the last month serving on a federal grand jury. I am privileged to work for a company which pays my regular wages for the entirety of my grand jury service, so it was not a financial hardship for me. That is not going to be the case for everyone. Even outside of the financial hardship, I usually hear people complain about being called for any kind of jury service. Their complaints range from genuine hardships like a lack of child/eldercare or financial hardship to simply not wanting to be stuck in a courtroom all day. But I encourage anyone for whom it will not be a great hardship to serve if and when you are summoned, or even to volunteer to serve. Here is why:
Except for cases where the court chooses to have a preliminary hearing instead of a grand jury, grand juries are the ones who decide whether the person accused of a crime is formally charged with that crime and sent to trial. Not a judge. Not the prosecutor. Not a politician. You, the ordinary person on the grand jury, do that.
Over the course of my service our panel heard over 30 cases, all from our local community. Because this was federal court, all of the cases we heard were for alleged felonies: murder, illegal weapons possession, robberies, assaults of various kinds, and so on. All of these things happened in our neighborhoods. More than once at least one person on the panel would mention during deliberations, “That happened down the block from me!” I said that at least once. Therefore, if the evidence the prosecutor presented was sufficient for us to vote to indict (formally charge the accused), we were actively involved in keeping the communities we live in safer.*
Just as important, if the evidence was not sufficient to formally charge the person, we voted to dismiss the charge. That means we kept people from being charged with crimes they did not appear to have committed. Living in a community which is predominantly working class and of color and knowing how the legal system is biased against us, that is very important to me. We gladly did this more than once, and it felt just as good to me, if not better, than indicting people.
Here is another interesting fact: grand jurors are selected from the voter registration rolls. So if you are not registered to vote, you cannot have a part in making sure criminals are kept off your community’s streets or innocent people are not charged for crimes they did not commit.
Do you want the legal system to be more fair for us ordinary, non-wealthy people? Register to vote, then when you are summoned for jury duty of any kind, I beg you to serve willingly. Otherwise you are leaving your community in the hands of people who may or may not care about people like you.
*This is why there have been demands for a special prosecutor whenever a police officer is charged with a crime. Nearly every case we heard included a police officer testifying to support the case the prosecutor was making against the civilian who was being accused. We heard about the potentially fatal situations those cops put themselves in daily to make sure criminals are taken off the streets. But because some police officers care more about protecting the brotherhood than protecting and serving the communities, those officers would refuse to cooperate with prosecutors who successfully present a case to indict one of their own. A special prosecutor wouldn’t have to worry about the police not working with them on a day to day basis: they could present strong evidence against the accused cop with far less fear of backlash.
Also, grand juries are instructed to vote only according to the evidence presented, not according to their own feelings or what they may have heard about the case outside of the grand jury chamber. If a grand jury fails to indict a cop who obviously killed a civilian, it is because the prosecutor did not present evidence strong enough to indict. Perhaps they didn’t show the video the rest of the world saw on social media or play the 911 call. If they don’t present the evidence, the grand jury cannot use that information to vote, even if they had seen it on tv or on social media.
**You should have heard me howling in indignation when a recent episode of Grimm showed a supposed grand jury scene. In that scene the judge dismissed the grand jury and the criminal case against the police chief without the 6-member grand jury ever hearing it. In real life a judge is not present in the grand jury chamber, and a grand jury consists of at least 16 people. I almost threw something at the tv as I listed the problems with the scene to my incredulous partner.