Grand juries are seen as essential tools to lend checks and balances to the justice system. But some also see them as tools of the prosecution.
In that process, however, grand juries are free to consider a wide range of evidence including hearsay, rumors, illegally obtained evidence and other elements that would not be admissible in a criminal case. Publishing those findings in a report, some argue, could serve to prejudice an eventual trial jury.
Though the only issue jurors are tasked with is deciding whether a prosecutor's evidence is legally sufficient to justify an indictment, many argue that the jurors are often not qualified to answer that question, and largely need a hand from the prosecutor's office to make that happen. One example of a highly politicized grand jury investigation came in 2020, when a grand jury famously decided not to indict all but one of the white police officers involved in a raid that resulted in the death ofMany at the time raised questions about the leeway allowed to the grand jury in decidingagainst the officers involved or whether prosecutors had unilaterally decided that the involved officers acted in self-defense without submitting the issue to the grand jury for review.
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