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89 In the contemporary world, we have grown used to hearing about grand jury indictments. Between media scandals and procedural television programs such as Law and Order that follow the accused from arraignment to trial, individuals in our age are sometimes overly informed about indictments of public figures or fictional characters who have run afoul of the law. Indictments are the result of information provided to a grand jury, usually by the local prosecutor’s office. The grand jurors (not to be confused with regular, or petit, jurors, who sit during an ordinary trial) are shown the amassed evidence of a possible crime, and the prosecutor asks the grand jurors to return a true bill, which allows the prosecutor to proceed to trial against the individual named in the indictment. The grand jury has the option of rejecting whatever evidence is presented and returning the bill “ignoramus”—without knowledge or assurance that the crime occurred as the prosecutor suggested. But an indictment is not a presentment, and indeed, most historians, let alone laypeople, have never heard of grand jury presentments. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , however, grand jurors gathered and not only discussed the merits of possible indictments—which began with the prosecutor—but also raised complaints about individuals or practices within their community that they wanted to see changed. When grand jurors rather than prosecutors initiated the action, the resulting complaints were called presentments. Presentments , therefore, indicated faults, failings, and violations of both social norms and legal rules that grand jurors pointed out for others to see and hopefully to correct. Grand jurors were most often self-informing, bringing their own knowledge of wrongdoing in a community to their deliberations. However, grand South Carolina’s Grand Jury Presentments The Eighteenth-Century Experience Sally E. Hadden 90 Sally E. Hadden jurors were not the only ones who influenced the contents of presentments: judges routinely “charged” grand juries prior to their deliberations with considering the failings of specific people or laws, hoping that these charges would influence the grand jurors to present those failings. Sometimes judges succeeded, but on other occasions, their words went unheeded. Judge John Faucheraud Grimké, justice of Charleston’s Court of General Sessions in the 1780s, wanted a better jail. In lobbying the legislature for funds, he encouraged petitions, sent letters from jailors, copied the Charleston city council minutes about the topic, and prodded the grand jury to present the jail’s inadequacies . Years passed before his suggestion was taken up. South Carolina’s grand juries were not simply the mouthpiece for judges with an agenda for reform, however. This becomes most evident from an incident that occurred in 1793. In that year, the grand jury for Ninety-Six District presented a grievance against Judge Grimké for his apparent failure to do his judicial duty—the same Judge Grimké who had earlier supported the building of the Charleston jail. Grimké’s decision to leave the court at Ninety-Six District while it was still in session to return home to Charleston offended the grand jurors. They used the presentment process to accuse him of malfeasance in failing to carry out his circuit duties. The remaining judge at Ninety-Six, John Rutledge, tried to persuade the jurors that Grimké had done nothing wrong, but the jurors could not be dissuaded from presenting Grimké’s behavior to the state legislature. They felt his conduct was a “marked insult to the community.” The grand jurors’ decision to present Grimké forced both Rutledge and Grimké to defend his actions in lengthy documents to the state legislature. This would not have been necessary if the judges had not felt that the presentment would be taken seriously in the assembly and if Grimké’s sense of honor had not been offended. Rutledge tried to persuade the jury to renounce the presentment: “I told the Jury, when they brought it in, that I could not avoid ordering it to be laid before the Legislature; but, that, I should do so, as I really do, with very great reluctance.” Rutledge recorded that Grimké was not bound to work in Ninety-Six—the law did not demand it, and the job had been assigned to Rutledge alone—and that with only one courtroom, two judges could not conduct hearings simultaneously. Rutledge noted that he had conducted all the court business as quickly as any two judges could have done. Yet even while demonstrating that the grand jury was mistaken about the law, Grimké’s lack...

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