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The grand jury disagrees. So legally speaking, it's not clear that NYC police caused the person's death in an illegal manner.
In case you don't know, there's a thing called double jeopardy. You can't be charged twice for the same underlying crime. In terms of grand jury trials, you'd need new material evidence before you could come back.
The medical examiner deemed the death a homicide.
Double jeopardy only applies to criminal trials -- and grand juries aren't trials.
Not that I'm aware of, nor is there anything preventing attempting to pursue the old charges via judge or a fresh grand jury if anything new comes to light. But I'm not particularly informed on the particulars of how New York uses grand juries. AFAIK though, you DO still need to bring something new to the table to have a previously-addressed matter reconsidered. That's not explicit in the Constitution but from case law, existing precedent on due process protections. Some jurisdictions will also have it explicit by statute, and some courts will have it as a rule just to make it clear how they feel about prosecutors trying to waste their time with fishing expeditions. On the subject of immunity, I do know that if one is subpoenaed to testify as a witness in a New York grand jury, immunity is more or less automatic. This is required as the testimony is compulsory and would otherwise violate 5th amendment rights.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Sounds interesting - those civil grand juries, I assume they are not made up for every new case like a normal jury? Considering they can also investigate local government themselves. Is it random selection like normal juries?Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
Does a grand jury equal a prosecution in the double jeopardy rules? As in, if a grand jury decides not to bring a case forward, can that be undone later with new evidence? Because AFAIK new evidence does not affect double jeopardy. Over here if a prosecutor decides to drop charges, he can always pick them back up later and prosecute after all without breaching double jeopardy. Only exception is when he formally informs you that he's dropping charges permanently, because otherwise it would be a breach of his good faith.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
The reason I'm asking all this is that because in a case where the police is the defendant, and the prosecutor is seemingly biased towards the police because they are usually on the same side, and grand juries are greatly influenced by the prosecutor... That seems like it's stacking the odds heavily in favour of the defendant (at least it looks like that, and like I mentioned earlier it seems your police/prosecutors have a big image problem when it comes to enforcing laws against the police). Now if a grand jury is properly independent and not a rubber stamp thing, the system seems reasonable enough, but otherwise it seems weird for me there's no way to overturn what's basically a prosecutor's decision.
BTW, the victim's family could still sue in civil court, no? All of this only affects criminal charges, right?
Homicide, AFAIK, means a non natural death caused by another human but that does not mean murder/manslaughter/etc., and does not mean the policeman in question did anything wrong. For that a lot of other things come into play, intent, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
I'm sure Fuzzy can answer that better than I can. From what I know, it's not double jeopardy in the strict sense, but you'd need materially new evidence (i.e. fundamentally important new evidence). You could get civil rights charges (federal), but the feds said there's no justification for those.
Double jeopardy doesn't apply to going from criminal to civil court.
Well, the proceedings being secret doesn't help very much either. So, not only do we have a deck of stacked cards, no, we have a secret deck of stacked cards.
Court proceedings could be secret too...
I'm not seeing why court proceedings should ever be secret completely. Otherwise you'll just get kangoroo courts and rubberstamped proceedings for stupid stuff like "national security".
This wasn't secret completely either. We know exactly what evidence was presented...
Now you're playing dumb, Loki. I'm talking about complete openness, save for details which might endanger witnesses.
That would matter only in highly salient cases. No one's going to bother televising most grand jury proceedings, and I'm willing to bet they won't get newspaper coverage either.
If no one's interested then I don't see the point in keeping it secret in the first place.
The point is that it won't matter; it won't help fix the problem with grand juries.
Yeah, right, accountability is such a bad thing, won't ever fix anything. :rolleyes:
In essence, you're arguing for kangooroo courts and star chambers because you think that secret proceedings are such a nice thing to have. Bravo!
The whole point of these courts is to determine whether there's enough evidence to go to trial. You're making it sound like grand juries send people to jail.
No, they're impaneled each year and select a set of topics/issues to look into for the year when formed. I'm not sure on just how selection works, but people interested in participating contact the local Superior Court which administrates the panel and there is an extensive screening process.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
I don't know that "fundamentally important new evidence" is accurate, that strikes me as too strong, but it's fundamentally just a different venue for a "probable cause" hearing and follows fairly similar rules. The only major exception I'm aware of is that there's no requirement for the defendant to appear or even be informed of the proceedings. I just realized that's actually a part of one of the useful functions a grand jury serves and not necessarily an abuse. You can't do a probable cause hearing with someone who isn't in custody because the probable cause hearing, procedurally, is all about the 4th amendment's protection against warrantless & indefinite arrest. If you want to lay charges against someone you don't have in custody yet, you need a grand jury. The most you can get out of the courts is a warrant for arrest with further steps held until the person is in custody.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
And Khend, Loki's right about grand juries being "secret." The discussions/conferences/advice a prosecutor might seek before using prosecutorial privilege to lay charges against someone are also protected information. If a judge orders they can be forced to cough 'em up, just as a judge can order the record of grand jury proceedings to be unsealed but the process is not something they've ever been required to generally divulge.
What exactly is that secrecy for? I don't see anything useful coming out of that. As of yet, I have not seen one single useful argument supporting all this secrecy. Merely a "What does it matter?" by Loki which is a non-argument. And wrong to boot.
They're doing the opposite: They make people go not to jail. What use are all those court proceedings if you can simply bypass that through a biased prosecutor?Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Plus the relatives could sue the police for damages, right? Considering they are responsible for the victim's death.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Well secret grand juries aren't exactly a bad thing per se - aside from the reasons already mentioned, I oppose the perp walk thing (and in fact over here suspects are not identified by their last name in the media, usually), even bringing charges against someone can be very disruptive in your life, if even discussing whether to bring charges also becomes a media event.. (I realise that is what happened here, but I think that's more of an exception). Do you also want the police to publicly name and shame all suspects? And a use I got more from fiction, to hear evidence needed to press charges on, say, a mobster, in secret, to protect witnesses (and to not warn the suspect off).Quote:
Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro
Thanks. Though I thought the principle of juries was that they are of your peers, and this seems biased towards people who want to do extra work to bring law and order. Then again, also open for people who want to check on the prosecutors/local government/etc., so I guess that balances out. Though since wikipedia mentioned grand juries are usually supervised by the prosecutor's office, if they also do the screening and selection that could of course bring a bias.Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
And I suppose all of this is also different from state to state and in federal courts? To keep things simple for us? :p
Anonymizing is different from the records not being accessible at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
For instance, in Germany basically anyone related to court proceedings has the right to access the files pertaining to the case.
Even while your case is still active (but you're not in court, in which case it would of course be evidence)? IIRC (and I may be very wrong) the same thing is a right here, but only if your case is no longer active, and there's no public safety concerns or something similar. I would not be surprised if the USA also had something along the lines of the FOIA regarding old court/DA files.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro
The US legal system is adversarial. How much information the defense has about not just the facts the prosecutor has but how they are interpreted and presented matters. Knowledge of who is testifying and the exact things they are testifying to, down to their precise wording matters when it could be months before the criminal trial starts.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro
It's not a court proceeding.Quote:
They're doing the opposite: They make people go not to jail. What use are all those court proceedings if you can simply bypass that through a biased prosecutor?
Just who constitutes ones "peers" has always been a bit of a vague area :) In the case of California's civil grand juries, ones "peers" are either retired or doing work which leaves them a lot of free time on their hands, and rather civic-minded since it's an extensive time commitment with only token renumeration. Our civil grand juries also do function (and are paid for) as part of each county's Superior Court so they aren't under the DA's office though the DA can and will sometimes ask them to consider a criminal matter and I believe in some counties the DA can empanel its own grand jury for criminal matters aside from the mandate civil grand jury which the state requires for each county. And AFAIK, California is the only state that uses (requires, in fact) these "civil grand juries."Quote:
Thanks. Though I thought the principle of juries was that they are of your peers, and this seems biased towards people who want to do extra work to bring law and order. Then again, also open for people who want to check on the prosecutors/local government/etc., so I guess that balances out. Though since wikipedia mentioned grand juries are usually supervised by the prosecutor's office, if they also do the screening and selection that could of course bring a bias.
And I suppose all of this is also different from state to state and in federal courts? To keep things simple for us? :p
Right. For example, cameras aren't allowed in federal courts. The differences between states is compounding general confusion and anger -- Missouri's DA promised to release all grand jury testimony, but some was kept back on request by the feds (for any pending federal case) but New York has a stricter state law about grand jury secrecy, so virtually none of the facts were released.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
And aren't all jurors pulled from voter registration lists, which makes voter registration laws so important?Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
It's not the only way to end up with a jury summons and that's probably one of the least important factors in voter registration.