Indicted By the Grand Jury

Answer:

There are a number of ways that a prosecutor can charge a person with a crime. Of course, they can file the charges on what we call a direct complaint, and then after that, there’s a preliminary hearing. A preliminary hearing is a probable cause hearing in which evidence is presented before the judge, and the judge makes a determination whether there’s enough probable cause to allow the case to proceed toward trial. Another opportunity that the prosecutor has is grand jury proceedings. Grand jury proceeding is when the prosecutor calls together these select folks. They’re called a grand jury not a trial jury, and the prosecutor presents the evidence before this grand jury. The prosecutor selects what evidence is presented, what evidence is not presented. No one goes in really but the prosecutor and their agent or some police officer testifying about the facts of the case. The defense attorney is not allowed to go in, in most cases. Then they come out and what happens is, if the grand jury thinks there’s enough evidence being presented to them to allow the case to go forward to trial, then they issue a true bill and indict them with a grand jury indictment. That is the same as what a judge would do virtually saying, yes, there’s enough probable cause here to let this case go forward and be tried in front of a trial jury. You have to make sure that if you’ve been indicted via a grand jury, you talk to your attorney very early on because there are some opportunities where a competent defense attorney, if they have the evidence or maybe some exculpatory evidence, in Arizona we call it a Trebus letter, you can write a letter to the prosecutor saying hey, we got evidence that we want to submit at the grand jury here. We got some folks we want to testify, and you can actually even ask to show up and testify at the hearing yourself, and so there’s some opportunities there to affect the grand jury proceeding if you have evidence that is exculpatory. Again, if you’ve got this grand jury indictment, it’s so important that you call a competent lawyer, somebody that can intervene in this criminal matter because, again, this is an opportunity to get these charges dismissed, and you don’t have to endure the tragedy and the difficult of going through a full criminal process in our court. Call a competent lawyer. Call us. Call somebody so that we can make sure that your rights are protected under the law.