An excerpt from the Charlotte Observer:

During a single four-hour workday last week, a Mecklenburg County grand jury heard 276 cases and handed down 276 indictments.

That means the 18 jurors heard evidence, asked questions, weighed whether the charges merit a trial, then voted on the indictments – all at the average rate of one case every 52 seconds.…

“The entire system is a joke,” said Joe Cheshire, a Raleigh attorney who handles high-profile criminal cases across the state. “There is absolutely no living, breathing person with any kind of intellect who believes that a grand jury could consider and vote on 10 complex issues in the period of time that they use to deliberate on hundreds.”

Charlotte attorney Jim Cooney agrees. Rather than check the power of government, grand juries have become a prosecutor’s ally, he said, “that hands out indictments like they’re boxes of popcorn.”

The article notes that the one recent case where a grand jury declined to issue an indictment involved a police officer. Hmm.

For Cato scholarship on the problems with the grand jury system, go here.