What to Do When Jury Duty Summons Youby
Bill Barnwell When you open your mailbox this afternoon, the last thing you’d expect to find is a summons to serve on a grand jury or regular trial jury. Most people cross their fingers hoping they can go through life without ever being called to jury duty. Unfortunately, plenty of people do get called and are unprepared for what is before them. It is because of this ignorance that prosecutors are able to indict virtually anybody for anything in the grand jury room, and it’s also the reason that the vast, vast majority of jury trials end in a conviction. There are some key things you can do if you are ever called to serve in a grand jury or regular jury that can help stem prosecutorial abuses. First, let’s distinguish between the two forms of juries. A Grand Jury is a mechanism used to investigate cases and bring down an indictment if there is sufficient evidence that a crime may have been committed. The prosecutor presents the evidence to grand jurors, who are selected at random from the community. Grand jury proceedings are secret. Only the witnesses brought before the Grand jury can speak out during the proceedings about what is happening inside. After all evidence and witnesses have been presented, the prosecutor normally asks the grand jury to consider one or more bills of indictment. The standard for indictment is not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but is instead "probable cause." In 99% of cases, the grand jurors do what the prosecution asks and vote in favor of the indictment. In the federal system, all investigations of felonious conduct go before federal grand juries. Some states charge suspects through grand juries, such as North Carolina. This is how charges were initially handed down in the Duke Lacrosse Fiasco. Other states charge suspects through prosecutorial "information." For a much more detailed discussion of the sordid history of grand juries and their inherent problems see this column I wrote seven years ago on the subject. Speaking of the Duke Lacrosse grand jury, some of them are secretly speaking out. Apparently, the several grand jurors who spoke anonymously to ABC are regretting their previous decision to indict the three college students currently facing sexual assault charges. There’s probably little doubt at all that the other grand jurors are having similar reservations as well. What can we learn from all this? For one thing, if you are ever called to serve on a grand jury, do not just uncritically accept everything the prosecutor tells and presents to you. If you feel a crime really has been committed, then by all means do the right thing and vote in favor of indictment. But if you have some serious questions and reservations, be sure to challenge the prosecutor. Keep in mind that many prosecutors are highly ambitious individuals. High-profile indictments and convictions are beautiful notches in the belts of prosecutors. If you are ever investigating a public official or other high-profile individual, ask yourself if the nature of the charges is political. At the end of proceedings, don’t just assume you have to indict – you don’t. If grand jurors did their job and thought things through more critically they could discover beforehand whether or not the charges were shams or trumped up. Ninety-nine percent of the investigations would not result in the prosecutors getting their way. Money would ultimately be saved and power would be checked. Most grand jurors, however, just nod their heads at whatever prosecutors tell them and instinctively think that the targets of investigations are guilty. Certainly many times they are. Other times though they are not. It’s up to grand jurors to be a bit more discerning and ask whether or not the evidence does warrant charges. A further problem is that most grand jurors are uninformed about the nature of the charges and the alleged violations of the law in many cases. This is especially true in federal law where you can be charged for just about anything under some statute. If you are a grand juror and you don’t understand the facts involved, make sure you force the prosecutor to explain what exactly he or she is getting at. Don’t just allow him or her to present a bunch of confusing evidence that makes no sense but which you assume must be evidence of a sinister crime. At the end of the day, if you don’t understand the case and/or the charges, do not vote to indict (or in a regular jury trial, to convict)! Grand juries are set up to theoretically check the power of prosecutors. In practice, however, they just serve as tools of the prosecutor. Normally what the prosecutor wants, the prosecutor gets. The quicker he secures his grand jury indictment or his trial conviction, the quicker the jurors get to go home. When serving on a grand jury, avoid the following sentiments: "It’s just too hard, I don’t understand it all this stuff, so they must be guilty." "They are here so they must be guilty." "The prosecutor would not just make this stuff up or stretch the truth. It must be true." "Come on; let’s just vote so we can get out of here." "Man, everybody else seems really convinced except me that he (or she) is guilty. I guess I’ll just go along with it." "He’s a (politician, businessman, rich person, ethnic minority, white person, or insert any other group you are personally suspicious of) so he probably did do it." None of this is to say or suggest that most people who are charged with a crime are innocent. Nor is this to say that you should have an inherent bias against prosecutors and automatically take the side of the accused. I am simply saying that you should be fair and think through things critically. If you do not understand the charges, suspect the prosecutor is being heavy handed, or are just plain unconvinced, you have the right and duty to vote against indictment in the grand jury room or against conviction in the courtroom. Most of the advice for grand jurors is the same for regular jurors who serve on federal and state juries. There’s a big difference between the two types of jurors though. Grand jurors can simply vote to charge someone with a crime. Regular jurors vote to send somebody to jail or to the electric chair. Grand jurors can take away your reputation (and a great deal of money since you’ll be paying a great deal in attorney fees from now on). Court jurors can vote to take away your freedom or even your life. In both cases, there is a heavy burden for jurors to do the right thing. What about when someone has violated the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law? A case in point is the sad story of Genarlow Wilson, a case that has recently been getting a lot of deserved attention. Wilson is serving 10 years in state prison for aggravated child molestation. Basically when Wilson was 17 years old, he received consensual oral sex from a 15-year-old girl. In fact, it was the 15-year-old girl who instigated the sexual contact. Since the girl was less than one year below the legal of consent, Wilson had technically violated the law. Overzealous prosecutors brought the case to trial and Wilson was convicted. There’s so much more to this story and all the outrageous details can be read here. Now did Wilson do a good thing? Certainly not. He was at a wild hotel party where kids were engaging in sexual activity and drug use. But does a 17-year-old 12th grader deserve to have ten years of his life taken from him because he received consensual oral sex from a 10th grader? Is this child molestation? Is this why we have such laws on the books? No, we have these laws on the books to keep much older adults from preying on children and young teenagers. They were not designed to lock up 17-year-olds for an entire decade because they fooled around with a 15-year-old – only upon being released to be classified as a "sex offender." Every single objective person – basically everybody besides the prosecutors in this case – knows that this was a miscarriage of justice. Apparently the jurors themselves knew this when the verdict was handed down. The jury forewoman cried as the verdict was read. The jury reasoned, "We know this is excessive, but a technical crime was committed. Our hands are tied." But were they? Most jurors are not aware that there is such a thing as jury nullification. This is a basically a statement by the jury that, "We’ve looked at the big picture here and we are refusing to convict." Nullification allows the jury to not hand down a conviction even if a technical violation of the law has occurred. It honors the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. It is a check against prosecutors who, if they really wanted to, could manufacture technical crimes against most people if they look hard enough and spend enough money. Nullification has been used for good and bad purposes in the past. It obviously should not be used to keep people from receiving just punishment. For people like Genarlow Wilson, however, jury nullification can be used for just and noble purposes. If you are ever called to serve on a trial jury, do not forget that you have this perfectly legal tool available to you. You don’t have to send somebody to prison because they technically violated the law and the prosecutor wants to impose a disproportionate punishment to the defendant. Have more courage to say "no" to a sometimes unfair system than the Genarlow jurors had. In sum, don’t just assume you’ll never be called to serve on a grand jury or trial jury. If you are called, be fair. Do not show partiality to anybody. Remember though that targets and defendants have the presumption of innocence. Don’t just assume they are guilty and need to be scalped by prosecutors. Be an informed juror. Think critically about the prosecution’s case and motives. You have the right to say no if you are not swayed by or do not understand their case. Even in jury trials, distinguish between the letter and spirit of the law. As a last resort, jurors can invoke jury nullification when laws or prosecutors go too far.
February 7, 2007 Bill Barnwell [send him mail] is a pastor and writer from Michigan. He holds both a Master of Ministry degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies degree from Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana. Visit his blog. Bill is also running for President of the United States. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
It
might indeed be you that’s called. If so, you will hold enormous
power over a person’s reputation, career, and life. Those who have
been unfairly persecuted by the system can tell you heartbreaking
tales of how their lives have been ruined because of overzealous
prosecutors and undiscerning jurors. Therefore, make sure you stand
up for freedom, liberty, and justice instead of prosecutorial tyranny,
bias, and injustice.