Re: No Indictment in Chokehold Death
For all those claiming the GJ decision is proof it was legitimate...
"Having done my civic duty, now I know why, almost 25 years ago, then-
Chief Judge Sol Wachtler wanted to abolish most grand juries, telling the Daily News that district attorneys could get a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich." He wasn't wrong.
That's just the half of it. I encountered an assistant DA who read my fellow grand jurors and me instructions - but wouldn't let us read them for ourselves. I encountered a judge who finally gave me the instructions I was entitled to - and then said that I couldn't share them with the other grand jurors.
It's a Kafkaesque system where if you dare try to understand what you're doing, so that you might better exercise your civic duty, well, then you're just being a troublemaker.
But to call all this a formality is an insult to formalities. Of about 125,000 adult felony arrests in
Manhattan in the last five years, grand juries have only dismissed charges three times. Ham sandwich indeed.
Also, jurors can only listen to the criminal statutes charged. Requests for written copies of these laws were refused. Why? The assistant DAs aren't expected to memorize these definitions; they all carry books with the texts. Yet it is the jurors who have to decide about indicting people. The court should require the assistant DAs to leave a copy of the definition of each crime when making a charge.
After a week I again asked Blumberg if I could get the nine pages of grand juror instructions. She said she was told that we could not have them. "
READ IT ALL AT LINK BELOW>>>
Wanna bet those only 3 not indicted of 125,000 who were involved police or government people?
Here's NY grand jury realities...
Aronson: The strange secrets of N.Y.'s arcane grand jury system - NY Daily News