Time for a Runaway Grand Jury
The recent Catherine Dominguez headline tells us most of what we need to know. The investigation into the alleged violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act by commissioners and members of the Texas Patriots PAC has gone nowhere for the six months since special prosecutor Chris Downey was appointed.
Because the investigation has so far yielded NOTHING indictable for the Grand Jury who’s term is about to expire, then the only “two options” available according to the special prosecutor are to “extend or restart”. Whether that refers to the investigation itself or merely the Grand Jury we are not definitively told.
However, I offer here a third option to bring the investigation of this at best non crime or at worst Misdemeanor to a well deserved close. That is for the grand jury to take charge or the investigation themselves instead of rely in on this ridiculous special prosecutor to fumble his hourly billed way through to an obvious no bill recommendation.
Consider this, Chris Downey has had complete control of the the process for six months, has accumulated thousands of pages of evidence, ( 900 pages from Bill O’Sullivan alone in the interests of clearing his name) has had total access to all the witnesses and we assume has had to spare no expense in the interests of ‘Justice” yet he has resolved nothing. And the case I jokingly call email-gate, not exactly on par with the Warren Commission or the Pentagon Papers does not amount to a hill of beans in scheme of things. We sure don’t need to manufacture any more felons just for fun.
Besides, most of us have already reached a verdict, 1. The voters of the county are guilty of lazy stupidity for reelecting the current commissioners involved in the Joe Corley scandal investigation ( the same commissioners verbally reprimanded by a previous Grand Jury that paid too much store to prosecutors). 2. A TOMA violation is only a misdemeanor according to the statutes. 3. We don’t want to be punished economically through a prolonged bil by the hour attorney in Houston and 4. We don’t like what the PAC people did behind the scenes but it simply was not illegal.
RUNAWAY GRAND JURY
The power of the Grand Jury is fabulous and intended, as Attorney Roger Root explains, as “a bulwark against oppression” due to the grand jury’s historic powers to investigate the government and deny government indictments.
Today, for a Grand Jury to act in this fashion would be the mother of all nightmares for judges and prosecutors special or otherwise. But it would not be wrong.
A runaway grand jury is one in which the grand jurors have taken control of an investigation and are ignoring a prosecutor’s efforts to rein them in. In the nineteenth century, many American grand juries were crotchety and independent and did what they wanted; by the twentieth century, grand juries had pretty much come under the control of prosecutors.
A runaway grand jury is an exception to this rule–the grand jurors ignore the prosecutor(s) and start making their own decisions. Runaway grand juries were not uncommon in the early twentieth century. The best known of these runaway grand juries is probably the New York grand jury in the 1930’s that barred prosecutors from coming into the grand jury room and took off on its own investigation of corruption in New York city government.
The late Stuart A MacCorkle wrote the illuminating 1964 booklet THE TEXAS GRAND JURY where he said
It is within the power of a grand jury to inspect any public buildings within the county. It may investigate the work of any public official, office, or institution. It may inspect the books of the county. In short, the grand jury is the citizens watchdog over the allocation, management, and use of the county’s public funds and the performance of its officers.
Again, in “If It’s Not A Runaway, It’s Not A Real Grand Jury,” Root supports the idea –
A “runaway” grand jury, loosely defined as a grand jury which resists the accusatory choices of a government prosecutor, has been virtually eliminated by modern criminal procedure. Today’s “runaway” grand jury is in fact the common law grand jury of the past. Prior to the emergence of governmental prosecution as the standard model of American criminal justice, all grand juries were in fact “runaways,” according to the definition of modern times; they operated as completely independent, self-directing bodies of inquisitors, with power to pursue unlawful conduct to its very source, including the government itself.[7]
So please Grand Jury members, conduct you own investigation,bring this money wasting charade against the commissioners and the PAC members to an end.
Act independently, defend the innocent
the grand jury that indicted the RUD voters was their oppressor and should have investigated the practices of the RUD instead.The voters were innocent,wrongly indicted and convicted.