Grand Jury

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was summoned to be a grand juror and in fact am now sitting on a grand jury in Suffolk County. Although everything that happens in the grand jury is secret - secrets to be kept "to the grave" according to the Judge's instructions, I can explain a little about a grand jury versus a trial jury which seems a little unclear.

A grand jury is an arm of the court and the use of grand juries and trial juries (also called petit juries) goes back nearly 800 years when in 1215 both types of juries were used in England. The most important difference between grand and trial juries is:

• a grand jury decides whether there is legally sufficient evidence of a crime and whether there is reasonable cause to believe that the accused person committed that crime 
• a trial jury decides whether or not the person who is charged with a crime has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

The grand jury's work comes before a trial. 

There are 23 members of a grand jury and in order to conduct any business a quorum of at least 16 grand juror's must be present. In order to make a decision at least 12 grand jurors who have heard the essential and critical evidence and also the legal instructions must vote in agreement.

This grand jury's term will be for four weeks during which time we'll hear evidence for numerous cases. I found it interesting that out of 574,000 people who served as jurors in New York State in 2005, only 29,000 of them were grand jurors. Only 5% serve as grand jurors, I guess my number was up.

BTW, have a wonderful and safe Fourth of July week-end!

Comments

[Claudia]

Interesting and tedious at the same time. Four weeks is a long time but fairly standard for grand jury. Hate missing these beautiful days.

[ally]

thanks for the info- I did not know.
sorry to hear you are serving for such a lengthy period of time, or is that a good thing?
only 5%- pretty select group to be in.