Oregon uses the grand jury system rather than hearings in front of a judge to determine whether there is enough evidence to indict someone or file criminal charges.
My understanding of the procedures is that someone, usually someone from the DA's office, presents a paper and evidence describing what happened and what charges they want to file, and then the grand jury investigates and decides whether there is enough evidence to indict the person accused. If yes, then they, or the foreperson, signs the indictment and charges are filed, but if there is insufficient evidence then they are supposed to sign the paper as 'dismissed', and the matter is ended, the DA's office can't revisit the alleged crime. Is this correct? Because if it is then Lincoln County, Oregon has been misusing and interfering with grand juries and improperly or illegally pursuing innocent citizens for a number of years.
It's a small county and over the years I've heard from a number of people who have served on grand juries and some of them tell troubling stories, mostly without realizing the implications.
There are three areas where there seem to be problems. The biggest and most widespread one is withdrawing cases from the consideration of the grand jury without allowing the grand jury to dismiss them, leaving the DA's office with the option to shop around for compliant grand juries who don't understand or take their responsibility to investigate very seriously.
The second is that some of the DA's representatives appear to be mis-instructing grand jurors as to their powers, obligations and responsibilities, downplaying the importance of their investigation and implying that the DA's office wouldn't bother bringing insufficient cases before a grand jury and exaggerating their honesty and reliability to lull the jurors into abrogating their responsibility to investigate all allegations thoroughly.
The third is that some DDA's appear to have been suborning the perjury of uniformed officers in order to railroad some people.
For instance: One acquaintance was on a grand jury and said that one particular DDA specifically instructed them to hand back cases without signing them and got visibly irritated when the foreperson signed the dismissals anyway. His impression was that the DDA was planning to go back and gather more and present the case again to another grand jury. He also said that the DDA's instructions and take on their authority and responsibilities differed significantly from the handbook that had been given out at the beginning of the month's service.
Another example: In the fall of 2006 a friend of mine was chosen for that month's grand jury, (she has since died and so can't get in trouble for having leaked what happened). One of the cases was brought in by DDA Michelle Branam (OSB #032737). I was told that the allegation was that a local woman had accused a man, a stranger, of having broken into the 2nd story of her house, shoved her so she fell down on her bed and then burgled the house on his way out. Two officers had investigated the complaint and the first one corroborated the accuser's testimony. But my friend said that they had some other questions and loose ends they wanted to hear about, so they asked to see the second officer. She said that Ms Branam told the jury point blank, "You don't need to hear from him.". That apparently got a reaction from several people, including one of the grand jurors who happened to be an attorney just off a two month stint on an Oregon State Bar professional responsibility board in Marion County. Eventually, the second officer was produced and his story was very different, as he personally knew both parties. Starting with the casual correction that the man accused wasn't a stranger, but in fact the accuser's recently ex-boyfriend, he also stated, when asked by my friend, that the damage to the screen on the second story window didn't appear fresh, he thought it appeared as though it had been that way for a while. She said he seemed puzzled by some of the questions, in particular he said that the accused had been at the house that day, but hadn't been inside; he had stopped by to pick up his personal effects, which had been bagged and left on the front porch. My friend said that Ms Branam had the grace to act embarrassed and withdrew the case from consideration. Which I take to mean that they did not sign a dismissal. One can definitely understand why she might not have wanted the second officer to testify. Unfortunately, my friend couldn't remember the man's name, so I haven't been able to track down whether he was indicted by a later grand jury, but based on my observations of the Lincoln County 'justice' system over the past decade, I'd be willing to bet a dollar or two that he ended up with a plea bargain resulting in felony probation. Because you see, in Oregon, misdemeanor probation is on the county's dime, felony probation brings in money from the state. And Lincoln County brags about the percentage of people under their supervision for felonies, Lincoln County Community Corrections. So three quarters of their case load is state supported, significantly padding their budget. I've looked at the corrections department web sites for all the other counties in Oregon and none of them have anything like this. I even called a couple of the larger ones, figuring they might have a statistician to keep track of such things, but none of them had any clue what the ratio of misdemeanor to felony probation was, they didn't break out their numbers that way.
A year or so ago a state police officer, Darrel Van Hoose, was caught by a local defense attorney, Kathryn Benfield, cutting and pasting his testimony from previous reports in a number of DUII cases. She thought his phrasing sounded familiar on the stand and dug back through previous cases and found several exactly alike. Almost twenty cases ended up being overturned or thrown out because of the taint. Pretty useful, having a few uniformed officers who don't mind doing that sort of thing, even if you have to disavow them later.
I have also heard from another local defense attorney that on at least two occasions in the last few years, one his case and one someone else's, that the Lincoln County DA's office has actually filed charges on cases that had been dismissed by the grand juries. He said he happened to flip the page over and it was stamped and signed, "Not a true bill", on the back. The DA's office claimed both times that it was 'a mistake', but given the size of the staff in our little bitty county, that strains credulity.
My questions, for any attorneys who would care to correct me if I've misinterpreted anything here, are: Is what they're doing as illegal as it sounds? And, if so, how do we get an investigation of the practices? Obviously, going to the DA is out, and the AG's office does not seem to have any mechanism for reporting misconduct outside of that. It would seem to me that since the subject and substance of grand jury investigations are secret, but the procedures are not, that it ought to be fairly simple to take a representative sample of people who've served on grand juries in Lincoln County and ask them basic procedural questions like,"Did anyone from the DA's office ever withdraw a case from your consideration?", "Were you ever instructed to hand back a case without signing a dismissal?", "Were you ever discouraged in any way from fully investigating a case?", etc. And follow up on the answers.