On Fri, 12 Jan 1996, Michael Froomkin wrote:
sounds like jury tampering to me. a good way to go to jail quickly.
Probably not, especially once the grand jury's term has expired. What the non-lawyers must realize, however, is that (in most cases) relatively little of a "grand jury investigation" is conducted before the grand jury. It varies from case to case, and prosecutor to prosecutor, but gathering records using grand jury subpoenas (and reporting to the GJ that the records have been obtained), interviewing witnesses outside the GJ (and eventually summarizing the information when presenting a proposed indictment for consideration), is much more common. There are various reasons for this: minimize the inconvenience to the members of the grand jury (if they had to hear every witness, productive or otherwise ...), limited available grand jury time, unnecessary creation of Jencks Act material (testimony of trial witnesses which must be turned over to the defense), and simple lack of time. Know that agents cannot be present in the GJ except when they are testifying (and only one witness is allowed at a time). I, for example, have about 40 investigations going on for which I bear at least some responsibility. Most are conducted by the agents until they present the case to me for a final decision on whether to present a proposed indictment. Certain cases, of course, I am more involved in, and I would guess that the Mitnick investigation was one. But being more involved almost certainly doesn't mean bringing *every* witness to testify before the GJ. So even if a grand juror told you everything that went on in a particular case, you would not know everything the investigators/prosecutors know. EBD