Grand Jury Research Articles

Pandemic Revealed Unique Aspects of Sexual Addictions

Pandemic Revealed Unique Aspects of Sexual Addictions

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai‘i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case

Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai‘i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case

Bird Lovers

Bird Lovers Gabriel Louis (bio) She was from a town you would never pronounce right if you read it from a highway sign. You’d have to spend time there, or know somebody who called it home. Her angled bangs fell to her brow, framing a stare that conjured gemstones and tundras. Laron nearly died when he heard she smoked Newports. He raised the doors on the industrial dishwasher to stop its churn, and asked his bewildered question into the new quiet. How did a white girl come to develop a taste for those? She said it was something about the way that menthol hit when she was high, then she strode out to check on her tables. Laron had to clench the doorway to the kitchen with both hands. You could see the gold in his mouth. His look said he was thinking love. In her little town there hadn’t even been one whole black person, she said. In kindergarten there had been a boy with a black dad, and they made fun of him on the first day. She stood up and told the class that she had a black dad too. Her mom had answered the phone during dinner that night. Then she returned to the table and said, Colleen, did you tell a lie today? Under his breath, Laron said Colleen’s child could most definitely have a black dad. Only I heard him. I wasn’t thinking love, but there was something about her name, old fashioned, that made me picture a robe and slippers, the newspaper and a wingback chair. I had my dead grandfather’s robe and was short the rest. I didn’t read the paper much. Still, I imagined putting it down when she was upset and saying her name in a patient way that might calm her. I recognized sexism in the vision. It persisted. Laron washed the dishes. Once they’d been artfully layered with cheese and meat to complement the wine, Colleen and I brought them to the front of the house. We described the fanned arrays as we placed them on the table, and we kept the drinks full. Before returning the plates to Laron, we scraped the half-finished ones into the trash. Sometimes I ate from them. [End Page 98] ________ Often after work I couldn’t sleep. With the downstairs neighbor away at his girlfriend’s, Congo the rescued pit whimpered into the morning. I watched syndicated shows, decades old, on my little television. They were from before my time, but I understood that nostalgia was some drug. My favorite was the fairy tale with the black brothers living well-adjusted lives in a wealthy white man’s home. The brothers had the cutest pajamas. On the internet, I learned it had ended badly for all the actors. Even the nightly advertisements were rich with narrative. Necklaces with alarm buttons for the elderly, so they didn’t die slow deaths on the tiled floors of their bathrooms. And when the necklaces couldn’t save them, there was a company accepting monthly payments to insure their funeral arrangements. Most dramatic, perhaps, was the black cross against an orange sky slowly roiling with dark clouds, the word REPENT simple and urgent. ________ At work, a freckled server named Regan liked to ask the other servers what they thought would happen. She danced her fingers from their wrists up to their shoulders, miming panic. She could have been asking about the Super Bowl—a game in which she had no stake but knew could ignite passions. She never asked me, and I was glad for that. I clenched my teeth hard on my tongue. I’d heard spies could pass polygraphs this way: create a baseline of pain during the easy questions, and dull the difficult ones to follow. I didn’t understand the suspense; I knew. The cop would fly before a grand jury indicted him. ________ An unlikely constant in my life was fresh laundry. For work I needed black button-down shirts. I washed them with anything that wouldn’t leave lint, so I always had clean darks. The dress shirts would hang...

The Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital, 1870–1886: Mental Illness in Early Utah

The Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital, 1870–1886: Mental Illness in Early Utah

The 1871 Anti-Chinese massacre in Los Angeles, and Anti-Asian American antipathies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Aim: This paper examines the 1871 massacre against the Chinese people in Los Angeles, leading us to reconsider that massacre and relate it to the numerous hate crimes committed against Asian Americans today.Methods: The methods used were historical research and analysis of the social, cultural, and political contexts of the Asian Massacre in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.Results: Overall, the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre was a devastating event that resulted in multiple deaths. It provides a useful lens for comparing current acts of racism against Asians since the COVID-19 pandemic began.Conclusions: The United States has a long history of racist ideologies that have pushed social and political agendas to maintain power. From the grand jury’s failure to punish the murderers involved in the 1871 Chinese Massacre to political leaders posting racist tweets on social media in 2020, it is important to remember that hatred will always seek a public platform from which to spread. Nurses and in key positions to keep this from happening.

On Touching, Where Tender Meets Tough

On Touching, Where Tender Meets Tough

I Never

What protections should a person of diminished capacity accused of murder have? Should intangibles be given consideration, or only facts? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, John is found by police on the side of the road pulling a knife from a woman’s chest. He is arrested, put in jail, and awaits trial. His attorney insists that he plead guilty, but John asserts his innocence and refuses to cave to pressure. Mandy, the Sherriff’s wife, brings him meals and is struck by his religious faith. She brings a reporter to talk to him to publish his side of the story. This brings an additional investigation from outside lawyers and brings to light additional information. The story ends with John going before the Grand Jury and telling his side of the story.

Crisis Framing: One Jesuit University’s Response to the Catholic Priest Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Crisis

A 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report after a two-year investigation documented numerous incidents of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and the cover-up of these crimes by those in positions of leadership. Framing is a critical aspect of crisis response. Framing involves selecting and emphasizing certain attributes of an issue. This article examines the response of one Jesuit university in its attempt to frame itself and the sexual abuse crisis. The value of understanding frameworks for crisis assessment and response, public relations functions, and thinking through an organization’s mission and social legitimacy provides a comprehensive approach that can help an organization properly address a crisis.

Institutional crisis assessment and mission-driven response in practice: One religious-affiliated university’s response to the Catholic priest sexual abuse and cover up crisis

An institutional crisis occurs when individuals and organizations fail to perform the routines and roles that produce the collective interests and social order of the institution. The institution of the Catholic Church continues to endure a crisis of priest sexual abuse and those in positions of leadership covering up these incidents. The crisis reached another eruption point in 2018 when a Pennsylvania grand jury produced a report that documented these crimes. Any organization within the institution could proactively decide that it must respond to maintain its credibility, while also helping repair the reputation of the institution. A response to an institutional crisis should be driven by an organization’s assessment of events as well as its mission, values, and sense of responsibility to its stakeholders. The response should also use the unique skill and resource capabilities of the organization. This case study focuses on the response of one religious-affiliated university that was prompted by the Pennsylvania grand jury report. The appeal of studying a religious-affiliated university is that it serves dual missions: that as part of the larger religious institution and that of a higher education institution. In response to this institutional crisis, the university has a focus on victims’ concerns from the religious mission perspective and is using its capabilities of amassing and disseminating knowledge from the higher education mission perspective.

Trumped: Constitutional Issues in the Trump Tax Return Cases

Since the beginning of his candidacy, there have been demands for President Donald J. Trump’s tax returns. Since his election, there have been non-stop court battles over his refusal to release personal financial information. Several House Committees have sought President Trump’s personal information on multiple different grounds, each claiming a valid legislative purpose for needing the information. President Trump argues the subpoenas do not serve a valid legislative purpose and that the House Committees are seeking this information to release to the public. The various sides have been locked in legal battles for years, with no end in sight. While the House Committees seek President Trump’s personal financial information, the District Attorney’s Office of New York also seeks to subpoena the same information for a grand jury investigation into possible wrongdoing by President Trump in his business matters. Recently, the Supreme Court addressed each case in turn. The Court heard concerns ranging from the Supremacy Clause and separation of powers to whether a state may investigate a sitting President, and, if so, must the seeking party show a heightened showing of need. However, despite the recent Supreme Court decisions, further disputes involving President Trump’s release of personal financial information to both the House Committees and the District Attorney’s Office of New York are anticipated.

Prosecution Reform in South Korea: Elections, Independent Prosecutors, Expanded Police Powers, and Grand Juries

Prosecutorial independence is a major political issue in South Korea. Ending prosecutorial politicization has been debated for decades and is understood as crucial for enhancing the quality of democracy. President Moon Jae-In has recently pushed through several changes. This paper explains Korea’s prosecutorial reform discourse and the new reforms. Reformists have argued that the centralized, bureaucratic nature of Korea’s prosecution system facilitates its top-down politicization. To remedy this, they have advocated for adopting measures to decentralize and even democratize the Prosecutors’ Office. From a comparative perspective, prosecution reform involves a clash of Continental European versus Anglo-American styles of prosecutorial organization. Reformers, disenchanted with the Continental tradition, have challenged the legitimacy of their German-Japanese derived system and looked to the common law tradition for solutions to prosecutorial independence problems. While not naive about the drawbacks of aspects of Anglo-American prosecutorial organization, they have welcomed ideas on decentralizing and democratizing the prosecution. That reformers are the ideological descendants of the democratization movement has encouraged such thinking. An unspoken dilemma of Korea’s prosecutorial reform saga has thus been: should reforms *improve* bureaucratic accountability or *introduce* democratic accountability? This paper explains Korea’s prosecution reforms relating to personnel management, investigations, and charging authority. It analyzes competing bureaucratizing and democratizing ideas, including new regulations, proposals for prosecutor elections, the establishment of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials, the expansion of independent police investigative powers, and the adoption of the grand jury. This excerpt is taken from a working paper on prosecutorial independence in South Korea. The whole paper will be published in coming months.

The Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research: Ethics Guardians or Keystone Cops?

Human research ethics policies invariably hold confidentiality to be a core ethics principle. However, in North America over the past 50 years, numerous third parties—including police, grand juries, Congressional committees, coroners and corporations—have used various lawful mechanisms, such as subpoenas or search warrants, to attempt to gain access to confidential research information. The failure to legislate confidentiality protection for research participants in Canada may reflect the fact that there have been relatively few lawful threats to research confidentiality. However, the legal landscape has changed significantly over the past seven years; from 2012 to 2018, there were six new third-party party attempts to access confidential research information in criminal, civil and coroners’ courts. One of these challenges involved assisted suicide researcher Russel Ogden. In May 2014, the BC Coroner served Ogden, then a Kwantlen faculty member, a summons to interview him under oath concerning the death in 2012 of one of his research participants. Because the Coroner’s examination could potentially compromise Ogden’s promise of research confidentiality, he requested that Kwantlen provide legal support. When Kwantlen declined to provide that support, a third party made a formal complaint to the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct in Research concerning Kwantlen’s conduct. The ensuing article describes the Secretariat response to that complaint. The article suggests that, rather than leaving the defence of research confidentiality in the courtroom to individual research institutions, the Granting Councils should establish a fund to which universities contribute to defend research confidentiality against any lawful challenge.

How Prosecutorial Independence is Lost: An Empirical Look inside South Korea’s Bureaucratically Organized Prosecution

Prosecutorial independence is often conceived of in terms of the separation of powers. But it can also be understood from the perspective of mechanisms of accountability for prosecutors. The Anglo-American legal tradition has historically relied on democratic accountability for prosecutors (i.e., their selection by elections or elected politicians, control by grand jury, private prosecution, etc.). By contrast, the Continental European tradition has depended on mechanisms of bureaucratic accountability for prosecutors (i.e., their selection by meritocratic exam, hierarchical supervision, merit promotion, etc.). Comparative analysis of prosecutorial accountability mechanisms, which both establish and set limits on independence, can give us a fuller sense of the concept of prosecutorial independence. This paper examines prosecutorial independence in South Korea. Its prosecutorial institutions are derived from Continental sources, mainly Germany and Japan. The Korean people have become increasingly outraged towards their prosecutors for perceived politicization. In scandal after scandal, for decades, the Prosecutors’ Office has attacked the president’s enemies and protected the president – and his or her friends. By 2020, opinion polls showed that prosecutorial reform had become the second most important political issue for the public, after the global coronavirus pandemic. This paper – based on interviews with Korean prosecutors, judges, lawyers, and law professors – explains how the Korean Prosecutors’ Office experiences politicization, despite its Continental European organizational framework. It focuses on how independence is lost in three key areas: personnel policy, investigations, and charging decisions. The paper demonstrates how mechanisms of bureaucratic accountability for prosecutors can fail to establish prosecutorial independence. To summarize the paper’s conclusion: the centralized, hierarchical system for supervising prosecutors, including bureaucratic promotion, in theory establishes rational management and quality-control over prosecutors. But in reality, these mechanisms allow the upper echelons of the prosecutorial bureaucracy, and the politicians that appoint them, to exercise firm political control over the entire system.This working paper is part of a larger whole. Other parts discuss the history of the Korean Prosecutors’ Office, how reformers have sought to import elements of the Anglo-American independence style, and how Korea’s experience helps in conceptualizing prosecutorial independence in comparative perspective.

Applying Routine Activity Theory: A Case Study of the Sonya Farak Drug Scandal

Sonja Farak was a chemist for a state crime lab in Massachusetts. She was arrested for tampering with evidence while abusing narcotics at work. Her arrest led to the dismissal of thousands of drug cases in Massachusetts. Given the account that Farak was a law-abiding citizen, it is questioned as to how an educated person with a stable job would commit a crime of this magnitude. Though Farak provided testimony of her behavior, no research has been conducted on the explanation for her crime. To examine her behavior, data from Farak’s Grand Jury testimony are analyzed using a qualitative content document analysis. Examination of the data allows for the application of Cohen and Felson’s Routine Activity Theory, which provides a theoretical understanding of Farak’s evidence tampering and drug use. All three components (motivated offender, suitable target, and absence of a capable guardian) are presented. By doing so we get a better understanding as to how a law-abiding citizen, while participating in everyday routine life, can commit crime but remain undetected.

Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby

Reviewed by: Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby Emily K. Hobson Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman. By Susan M. Reverby. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 393. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5625-0.) In Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman, Susan M. Reverby offers an absorbing and deeply researched biography of Alan Berkman, a doctor, political prisoner, and global AIDS activist. Reverby, who is a well-known historian of public health, grew up with Berkman in Middletown, New York, attending college with him at Cornell University and remaining "distant friends" until his death (p. 2). Critical of Berkman's involvement in the armed underground yet empathetically drawn to her subject, Reverby engagingly animates the movements at the center of Berkman's life. Born on September 4, 1945, and raised in a Jewish family that moved from the working class into the middle class, Berkman was radicalized while in medical school at Columbia University, which, through the influence of the 1968 student strike, Black Panther Party health clinics, and efforts to democratize Lincoln Hospital, became a kind of laboratory for the health Left. Berkman's commitment to do no harm drew him toward supporting selfdefense against state violence. He provided care to prisoners injured at the Attica prison uprising and to Native activists in the Wounded Knee occupation and, starting in the mid-1970s, became a leader in three interrelated organizations of white anti-imperialists—the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the May 19th Communist Organization (May 19th), and the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. [End Page 367] In 1981 Berkman provided emergency medical care to activists in the aftermath of the attempted robbery of a Brink's armored truck, a disastrous action that was intended to fund the Black Liberation Army and that resulted in the deaths of a Brink's guard and two police officers. The robbery became the focal point of an array of grand jury investigations and conspiracy charges; Berkman was jailed for refusing to provide information and then indicted with others as an accessory after the fact. In 1983 he went underground with fellow members of May 19th, and for two years he helped carry out several bombings of government and industry buildings, all without harm to individuals. Long interested in prison health care, Berkman experienced its inadequacy firsthand after his capture in 1985. Diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, he found his life at risk as a result of medical negligence in prison, and he survived due largely to his own knowledge and connections. During the time he was held in the Marion Control Unit, a severe isolation facility that later closed due to international protest, he was the only licensed doctor in the prison. Berkman was convicted and sentenced to ten years on charges related to the Brink's robbery, and in 1988 he was indicted with six others for conspiracy bombing. The group, known as the Resistance Conspiracy codefendants, argued double jeopardy and termed their case a "testing ground" for government surveillance and the criminalization of dissent (p. 194). When Berkman's cancer returned, however, his codefendants agreed to guilty pleas and lengthy sentences in exchange for his charges being dismissed and the provision of cancer care. From his release in 1992 until his death in 2009, Berkman devoted himself to fighting HIV/AIDS. He became the medical director of an HIV/AIDS residential program, and after obtaining a fellowship and later a tenured professorship at Columbia, he researched HIV risk and prevention for people who were homeless, used drugs, were mentally ill, or had been imprisoned. Most significantly, he cofounded Health GAP, which won greater global access to HIV drugs through tactics ranging from insider advocacy to direct-action protest at the United Nations. In tracing Berkman's life, Reverby examines a white man's investments in anti-imperialism and feminism, a doctor's relationship to violence, and the centrality of health and medicine to the Left from the 1960s through the 1990s. Reverby draws skillfully on Berkman's unpublished papers, her own interviews...

Nixon/Trump: Strategies of Judicial Aggrandizement

In Trump v. Vance and Trump v. Mazars, the Supreme Court applied very different standards for subpoenas issued for the personal papers of the president, making it easier for a grand jury to acquire such materials than a congressional committee. The two opinions, both authored by Chief Justice Roberts, have been widely praised for suggesting that the president is not wholly above the law; indeed, they have been treated as the second coming of the Nixon Tapes Case. This Essay argues that while the Trump subpoena cases do have an important kinship with the cases concerning access to White House tapes during Watergate, this similarity is not quite as flattering as commentators imagine. What the cases surrounding access to Donald Trump’s financial records and the cases surrounding access to Richard Nixon’s White House tapes have in common above all else is a project of judicial self-empowerment at Congress’s expense. What distinguishes them, on the other hand, is the immediate result of the two sets of cases: whereas the Nixon Court acted to push a lawless president out of office, the Trump Court acted to ensure that the information sought by other institutional actors could not have electoral consequences for another lawless president.

Freedom Dreams: What Must Die in Music Therapy to Preserve Human Dignity?

This commentary was written on the week of September 28, 2020, as grand jury decisions on the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, were publicly announced on news and media outlets. Six months after Breonna Taylor's brutal murder in Louisville, Kentucky (United States), justice for her life has not been actualized. The author reflects on this injustice and discusses its relationship to anti-Black violence and systemic oppression in music therapy culture and practice.

Prosecutorial Discretion and Republican Non-Domination

Prosecutors in the US legal system have great power to interfere at their discretion in the lives of citizens, and face relatively few checks on the exercise of this discretion. The vast scope of the criminal law provides a pretext for prosecuting nearly anyone. Meanwhile, other features of the legal system, such as the way plea bargains are structured and the doctrine of prosecutorial immunity, further increase prosecutorial power. And existing institutional restraints on prosecutorial abuses, such as democratic accountability, the grand jury system, and the possibility of a selective prosecution defense, are mostly ineffectual. I draw on republican political theory, including insights from Philip Pettit and Elizabeth Anderson, to argue that this state of affairs gives prosecutors dominating, and therefore unjust, power over vast swathes of the public. I then survey some potential institutional changes which might help ameliorate the problem.

Revised charges filed against Kansas chemist

University of Kansas chemist Feng “Franklin” Tao now faces 10 federal felony charges for wire fraud and making false statements related to his interactions with China, according to a grand jury ind...