ABOLITION OF GRAND JURIES.
A DEAD set is made at grand juries, as useless lumber; and there is this peculiarity in the attack, that those bodies, in manycases i at least, are anxious for their own extinction. The anxiety s not , to be wondered at. There is something ludicrously irksome in being bustled out after an early breakfast to the county town, to , sit shut up in a room for many hours, possibly for some days, with -a small but heterogeneous party of gentlemen, in order to fulfil : forms which are generally felt to be superfluous and obstructive. The occasion no doubt, affords the roturier the opportunity of meeting a kid or two, and of talking afterwards about distin- guished "fellow-jurymen"; but on the whole, the pleasure does ' not compensate for the annoyance -of being called out of one's . usual habits to engage in a business which is troublesome, thank- less, and useless. One of the most persevering champions in the crusade is Mr. Sergeant Adams, the Assistant Judge of the Middlesex Sessions; who made an effective sally at the meeting of Magistrates on Fri- day. He brought up several presentments from Grand Juries, all concuning, with a delightful candour, in acknowledging the use- lessness ot their body. He mentioned some remarkable instances of maleadministnition on the part of grand juries. For example, a woman had been five times committed for trial; yet five times, in the teeth of evidence the bill of indictment had been ignored. Indictments often fail because witnesses give a version their evidence different from that which they gave before the commit- ting Magistrate. Sometimes witnesses are corrupted : Mr; Set- geant Maine mentioned a case in which 81. was left for a yilaara.
conditionally on the acquittal of a prisoner. And grand jurymen themselves do not escape suspicion.
But the severest condemnation of the system is to be derived from observation in the grand-jury-room itself. Twenty-three gentlemen are picked out of a long list, receive a very general charge from the judge, and are put alone into a room to do the best they can with law, indictment, and witnesses. Their :first duty is to elect a foreman which is sometimes done formally enough, sometimes with that kind of haphazard, higgledypig- gledy, conversational, joking burlesque upon form, that mystifies the young gentleman first initiated into the Eleusynian mystery, and prevents anybody from knowing how the vote has gone until the magnate takes his conspicuous seat. Then a bill" is brought in by an obsequious understrapper ; and the chairman reads it in a humdrum way, not very conducive to clear under- standing. The first witness endorsed is called, and bows into the room : the chairman examines him ; the busy gentleman on the right examines him ; the stolid gentleman on the left examines thn chairman; the impracticable gentleman at the bottom of the table determines to thwart the busy gentleman—badgers the chairman, bullies the witness, and grows pale with independent intelligence. So on with the rest. All the witnesses disposed of— not always in very good lawyerlike fashion,—the finding has to be "discussed." How do grand juries come to an unanimous de- cision t Who shall tell? You inside that sacred room, are sworn to secrecy; you, withou% are excluded from knowing. Do they toss up—do they take a show of hands—or do they, in every case by some ex officio miracle, become absolutely unani- mous! BY whatsoever process' the finding is at last contrived ; and the chairman endorses the document—perhaps one at which the whole jury have sneered—as "a true bill "; or naively signs himself" Ignoramus." And so on again with the other bills. The "discussions" are the most irregular things imaginable. Sometimes the case is clear enough ; sometimes it puzzles the whole conclave to comprehend some initiatory point, and a true candour would write "Ignoramus" with a very broad signification. Sometimes the impracticable gentleman will have his crotchet, and the jury, with the need of dinner before their eyes, give in. There may be a " saint" in company,—the whole proceedings take an austere turn, and the criminatory evidence is strained to its utmost. Or an influential member is no saint,"—personal anec- dotes illustrate the dry questions of law, and a laughing liberality is imparted to legal -constructions. iloivever, in one way or other, the bills are all" returned"; the grand jurymen receive due thanks ; and they get home as fast as they can. All this is very idle ; it is an obstruction in the course of law, and would be quite as well swept away: But the change involves others; for in abolishing the absurdi- ties of the system, it would, be quite as well not to lose what advantages it may have. We do not set much store by the dis- charge of a prisoner a little sooner, though even that is not to be despised. By means of the grand jury, some degree of publicity is saved in the case of malicious prosecutions, intended, not to succeed in court, but to attach a male fama to the defendant by the mere fact of public trial. The very heterogeneous nature, mul- tiplicity, and seclusion of the grand jury, endow it with a cer- tain irresponsibility against cant, and enable it to block out classes of prosecutions which are perhaps technically legal but altogether absurd or inexpedient.
No doubt, many of the advantages incidental to the system might be attained by another channel—by the appointment of a public prosecutor, removed by character and station above paltry influences.
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