The Grand Jury

Today’s Charlotte Observer brings an eye-opening article—including quotes from Joe Cheshire and Jim Cooney—about the sorry nature of North Carolina’s grand jury system. An institution that supposedly protects the rights of the accused, Cheshire and Cooney both suggest, does no such thing.

The article focused on the case of Randall Kerrick, a North Carolina police officer who killed an unarmed, African-American man. A Mecklenburg County grand jury initially declined to indict Kerrick, but the attorney general (who’s prosecuting the case because of a conflict of interest in Charlotte) then took the case to a second grand jury, which returned an indictment for voluntary manslaughter.

The scandal came in the daily record for the grand jury that indicted Kerrick. That day, it heard 275 other cases, and returned indictments in all 275. In an interview with the paper, Cheshire termed the “entire system . . . a joke,” noting that “there is absolutely no living, breathing person with any kind of intellect who believes that a grand jury could consider and vote on 10 complex issues in the period of time that they use to deliberate on hundreds.” Cooney added that grand juries no longer protect the accused, but instead function by handing “out indictments like they’re boxes of popcorn.”

Cheshire also revealed some information about the lacrosse case grand jury, reporting that he had heard the body returned indictments—again, for a crime that never occurred, and in the police manufactured inculpatory evidence—in all of four minutes. ABC’s Law & Justice Unit had previously touched on some of the grand jury’s attitudes.

It’s worth recalling, moreover, that the grand jury that indicted Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty did so on the basis of false information. As former DPD Sgt. Mark Gottlieb confessed in his deposition for the Nifong ethics trial, he told the grand jury that Crystal Mangum never changed her story about the night of the party after she got to the hospital. In fact, the false accuser and now-convicted murderer never told the same story twice. What might have happened, for instance, if Gottlieb had told the grand jury that Mangum had identified four, rather than three, perpetrators in the rigged departmental photo array? Or if she twice claimed to have recognized a lacrosse player that wasn’t even at the party?

By the way, absent Gottlieb’s revelation, we never would have known the grand jury was presented with incorrect facts, since in North Carolina, there’s no record of what’s said to the grand jury.

The Observer also features UNC professor and former federal prosecutor Richard Myers, who said that he “believed” in the institution of a grand jury to protect citizens’ rights, just as he believed in the value of a fire extinguisher.

The comparison is hard to take seriously; indeed, two examples from the lacrosse case demonstrate how grand juries can actually harm the accused. First, if Mike Nifong hadn’t gone to the grand jury, he would have needed to pursue a probable cause hearing. And so, in the midst of the primary campaign for DA, grand jury secrecy prevented the public from knowing the weakness of the prosecutor’s case.

Second, the 4^th Circuit panel used the excuse of the grand jury (operating from false information) indictment as one of the grounds for letting the city of Durham off the hook in the civil suit filed by the falsely accused players.

But apart from the specifics of the lacrosse case, grand juries can harm anyone who’s indicted, since too many people poorly understand the judicial system, and assume that a grand jury indictment implies guilt. Nonetheless, you’d expect a major newspaper—such as, for instance, The Guardian—to have a sense of what grand juries do. It appears not—as this item from Brad Bannon’s Tumblr reveals.