DIAMOND JUBILEE, GRAND JURIES, AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY - 028

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TRANSCRIPT:

​​This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, diamond jubilee, grand juries and cultural diversity.

I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. This is episode number 28 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear mom, happy birthday to you. The number one fan of this podcast is none other than my mother. She's celebrating her diamond jubilee, let's call it, this Tuesday. I wanted to not only publicly embarrass myself through singing but I wanted to wish you, mom, a very happy birthday. Thank you for listening and thank you for your undying support. I could not have asked for a more loving and supportive mom. I love you and happy birthday.

Speaking of thank yous, I want to thank gold shield patron Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and coffee club patrons, Joan Raymond, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, and Kate Wagner. Your support keeps the lights on in the bureau. Please support all of these awesome authors by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at WritersDetective.com/28. Now if you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit WritersDetective.com/Patreon.                                                                                                                                                                                         

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In 1962, Noah Weinstein and William J. Shaw wrote, "A grand jury is a short lived representative, non political body of citizens functioning without hope of personal aggrandizement. It comes from the citizens at large and soon disappears into its anonymity without individual recognition or personal reward." Today, we're talking about grand juries. Now in the United States, a federal grand jury consists of 16 to 23 people and it's an important tool that allows prosecutors to issue subpoenas that require people to produce documents and other evidence and subpoenas can also be used to compel people to testify under oath before a grand jury.

There are also grand juries at the county level in many states, so those grand juries investigate state crimes, not federal ones, and those are made up of either 11, 19, or 23 people, depending on the population of the county, or at least that's the way it works in California. For criminal law, grand juries are tools used as part of criminal procedure to bring an indictment against a defendant. Now this might be surprising to some of you listening outside of the United States as grand juries have been abolished or are rarely used throughout the rest of the English speaking world.

Now if you're a fan of true crime or have been following the Mueller investigation, you have undoubtedly heard the term indictment before. It's important to understand that indictment or being indicted means that the criminal...                                                           Continue reading...

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