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- Title
Private Communications with Grand Juries.
- Authors
Fremon, William J.
- Abstract
The article presents information on the role played by the grand jury in the laymen's initiative in criminal law. A grand jury has enormous powers which it seldom exercises because its members have not been made aware of the full extent of a grand jury's powers. By the common law and by statutory law, the grand jury has extraordinary powers for setting the machinery of investigation and justice in motion, regardless of the wishes of public prosecutors or judges. Having that broad power, its potential value in the enforcement of the law cannot be overlooked, but it is the lack of understanding of this power that has caused the present inertia and the resulting attacks on the system. The need, therefore, is for better informed grand juries. The judiciary is to blame, in most instances, for the prevailing ignorance of grand juries regarding their full powers. On one occasion, a judge in his charge to the grand jury put stress on an instruction to the effect that the grand jury was prohibited from having communications with anyone except the court and state's attorney and that it was improper for anyone else to send communications to the jurors, or for the jurors to receive them.
- Subjects
GRAND jury; CRIMINAL law; JURORS; CRIMINAL procedure; JURY; COURT personnel
- Publication
Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (08852731), 1947, Vol 38, Issue 1, p43
- ISSN
0885-2731
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/1138816