My View | Grand juries have lost their independence

Recent grand jury decisions in Missouri and New York have sparked national protests. But while thousands of citizens may have protested the outcomes of those grand-jury deliberations, the bigger concern should be over the fact our grand juries have lost what our Founders originally constructed.

The roots of our grand jury, which is the primary tool our Founders gave us to keep the government under our Constitution, go back to Article 61 of the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D. The grand jury has three primary functions:

• Protect common people from unjust charges from those in power.

• Make sure the correct bad actors stand trial, based on the grand jury’s own investigations and from evidence donated by We the People and the government.

• Reach into every part of our government and root out corruption. The definition of corruption includes anything repugnant to our Constitution.

Today, unfortunately, the government controls grand-jury outcomes.

Simply put, because politicians didn't like being held accountable to their oaths of office by the grand jury, the control of our grand jury has been taken over by our government so effectively that its decisions today are controlled primarily by the prosecutor.

By design, the grand jury has always been The People’s Panel, completely independent of government. As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia reminds us in United States v. Williams (1992), “… it belongs to no branch of the institutional government, serving instead as a kind of buffer or referee between the government and the people.” And he continued “... The Fifth Amendment’s constitutional guarantee presupposes an investigative body acting independently of either prosecuting attorney or judge …”

In summary, the grand jury is not part of government. Instead, it is a constitutional feature in its own right, owned by We the People for the benefit of We the People.

In 1946, however, the Progressives wrote in a footnote to the draft of the U.S. Rules of Criminal Procedure that they henceforth considered obsolete the grand-jury presentment capability. This single move started the progression of steps whereby our grand jury lost its full independence and came under almost complete control of the government, usually in the form of the prosecutor.

This move is clearly unconstitutional because our right to an independent grand jury is guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution.

So we need to wake up and re-establish independent grand juries in each county. Only then will we return justice into our judiciary system and dramatically reduce government controlled outcomes from our grand jury.

Rodger Dowdell, a resident of Manatee County and former CEO of American Power Conversion Corp., is a co-leader in Florida of an effort to re-establish the Common Law Grand Jury. He can be reached at [email protected].