Power of the people: Trump triggers a renaissance for grand juries
Grand juries — written off for decades as a pointless anachronism — are making a comeback under President Donald Trump.
“They have been resurrected,” said Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a defense attorney and University of Dayton law professor. “For a long time, many people have been questioning why we even have grand juries. Like, what’s the purpose? …They don’t do anything. They don’t protect people. And then the last couple months, we start to see that, maybe the founding fathers were right about this.”
Grand juries have emerged as a major stumbling block for Trump’s drive to use the criminal courts to exact retribution on his perceived political foes.
Federal grand juries operate in near-total secrecy and decide whether prosecutors can bring a criminal indictment in the first place. Unlike trial juries, they don’t need to be unanimous; rather, a majority of their 16 to 23 members must agree to return an indictment. And their only job is to determine if the Justice Department has brought a plausible case — a relatively low standard which led to the cliche that prosecutors could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
But in the Trump era, grand juries are no longer a rubber stamp. Instead, they’ve become a headache for prosecutors trying to advance controversial Trump policies like mass deportations and militarizing law enforcement. Dozens of recent cases in Washington, D.C., have been met with so-called “no bills” — the shorthand for a grand jury declining to return a bill of indictment. And grand juries in other jurisdictions have turned down high-profile cases that Trump has prioritized.
“Suddenly, grand juries are on the radar screen in a way they haven’t been in a very, very long time,” said Kevin Washburn, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and an Interior Department official under former President Barack Obama.
Grand juries in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Alexandria and Norfolk, Virginia, have all rebuffed federal prosecutors recently. [Continue reading…]