Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1922-03-17
THE GRAND JURY

The Grand Jury is a very ancient
English institution.
1t dates back to nearly a hundred
years before the Norman Conquest.
1t was originally designed to protect
the citizen from tyranny by preventing
any criminal charge from being
brought against him except by a vote
of his fellows.
Like a good many other institutions,
it seems to have outlived it's useful
ness. In England it was suspended at
the outbreak of the great war as be-
ing an obstruction to justice. And
Parliament voted that it should re-
main suspended until the end of the
calendar year following the official
proclamation at the close of the war.
Frederick Cunliffe Owen gives an in
teresting summing of the case against
the Grand Jury system, from which l
note the following points:
From being an institution intended
to protect the liberty and the good
name of citizens, it has become an in
stitution that lends itself TO persecu-
ton, and a sort of blackmail.
Grand juries are usually ignorant
of the law, and show a disposition to
indict upon the strength of testimony
which no experienced Judge would
admit.
There is a better system in France,
where the preliminary examination of
a suspected man is carried on by a
skilled court officer.
Sometimes weeks and even months
are allowed to elapse between the
bringing in of an indictment and the
trial, and during the interval the party
concerned remains under a stigma.
While every lawyer knows that an
indictment by a Grand Jury may or
may not mean something, it is very
near to a conviction in the minds of
the general public.
The public argues that there must
have been some damaging evidence to
warrant any indictment; that there
must have beer some fire where there
is any smoke.
This is by no means the case al
ways, as legal shysters are skilled in
making smoke without fire.
After the indictment, the case is at
the mercy of the legal authorities, who
are at liberty to prolong unduly the
period between the indictment and the
trial by all sorts of legal excuses.
The. distinct charge is made by Mr..
Cunliffe-Owen that Gin the City OF
New York there have been during the
past year a number of indictments re-
turned against men who have never
been allowed to know the nature of the
offenses with which they are charged
or the names of their accusers, who
knew nothing, indeed, of the fact thai
they had been charged with any
t wrong-doing until they were arrested
on the strength of a Grand Jury in
l dictment returned against them"
( A man under indictment is usual!
suspended from an Office he may hold
and this may work great hardship ant
lose him his job, and all before it is
established that he has committed any
crime.
The Grand Jury, in short, offers
T facilities of the most cruel and lntol'
cradle forms of persecution, against
which there is virtually no redress
and often blackens the reputation o.
people upon the flimsiest of testimony
While the Constitution prevents
Congress from doing away with Fed
eral grand juries, there is nothing tc
prevent individual states of the Union
from abolishing grand juries within
their borders, unless their own Con-
stitution prevents their Legislature
from doing so.
A movement is now OF foot in sew
eraI states to do away with the Grand
Jury system. But this movement Will
receive much impetus if it is abolished
in England, the country from which
American laws are mostly drawn
By the Spectator in the New YORK
American.