American Grand Jury Process needs to be Taken to Court–and Vetted in Open, Public Way

“Let’s take the federal data, 162,000 cases brought before grand juries, only 11 of those did not result in indictments. When you talk about the — people say this kind of cliché thing, you can indict a ham sandwich with a grand jury, that’s not really an exaggeration. and so when you look at that data, that is enough to show you what sort of — what the context is, but when you dial down on some of that, what we’re realizing is, it’s almost impossible to get a conviction of a low enforcement officer who murders a civilian while in the line of duty. That is whites, blacks, whatever. It is more pronounced because more black folk are being murdered — unarmed black folk being murdered by law enforcement, but, the reality is that we have got to at least revise the grand jury process for the indictment and prosecution of law-enforcement who are accused of or suspected of or alleged to have murdered civilians, particularly unarmed civilians. You have people playing for the same team and that is why you can’t get indictments out of those particular kinds of situations. So, the grand jury process has got to be revised for those cases. Once again, biases shape and inform how those processes work as well but there are some structural things, some policy things that we can do directly to get the grand jury process to work in these particular kinds of cases.”—PROF. JAMES PETERSON