• Are grand juries as secret as they oughta be?

    From micky@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jun 5 09:47:10 2023
    If the grand jury procedures are secret so as not to embarrass a person, possibly innocent, who is being investigated, how does that work when
    everyone knows who is being investigated, and it drags on for most of a
    year? It seems like "secrecy" either doesn't exist or does no good.

    There must be some cases where little evidence is ever brought forth,
    and no convincing evidence, and in those cases, it seems like it would
    be better for an innocent person if everyone knew what the grand jury
    knows. If the public doesn't know, they may still think he's guilty as
    sin but clever enough to hide the proof of what he's done. Has any investigated person ever tried to make grand jury proceedings public,
    when he thought the facts would make him look better than the public's imagination would?

    --
    I think you can tell, but just to be sure:
    I am not a lawyer.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From micky@21:1/5 to misc07@fmguy.com on Fri Jun 9 08:15:26 2023
    In misc.legal.moderated, on Mon, 5 Jun 2023 09:47:10 -0700 (PDT), micky <misc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

    If the grand jury procedures are secret so as not to embarrass a person, >possibly innocent, who is being investigated, how does that work when >everyone knows who is being investigated, and it drags on for most of a
    year? It seems like "secrecy" either doesn't exist or does no good.

    There must be some cases where little evidence is ever brought forth,
    and no convincing evidence, and in those cases, it seems like it would
    be better for an innocent person if everyone knew what the grand jury
    knows. If the public doesn't know, they may still think he's guilty as
    sin but clever enough to hide the proof of what he's done. Has any >investigated person ever tried to make grand jury proceedings public,
    when he thought the facts would make him look better than the public's >imagination would?

    As my luck would have it, someone on MSNBC talked about what seems to be subject of the first paragraph above, and he said that there are covert
    grand juries and overt grand juries. So it would follow that when
    everyone knows how is being investigated, who is being presented to the
    grand jury for indictment, it's an overt grand jury!

    Unfortunately, to say the least, when I google overt grand juries
    there is not a single hit. In fact, in the first hit, overt does not
    appear, it's been changed to over.

    So what was the guy talking about? Have any of you ever heard of an
    overt grand jury? (and btw, there are no hits for covert grand jury
    either.)

    This points out, in the age of aggressive lying, how easy it would be,
    and probably has been, to make up things and claim they have already
    happened. Like the race riot in Altoona Pa. where 31 people were
    lynched. Or the fire in Paris where 1/3 of the city burnt down.
    Neither of these happened. I just made them up on the spot, but there
    are people with motives to make up stories. How are we going to
    protect ourselves from this.

    And are there overt grand juries, perhaps without being named overt?

    --
    I think you can tell, but just to be sure:
    I am not a lawyer.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)