The Grand Jury Farce

"Ken" at Popehat, himself a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, reacts to the government's silencing of pain patient advocate Siobhan Reynolds:

Let me pause and offer you a dark confession. I miss the grand jury. When I want documents or evidence now as a criminal defense attorney, I have to ask the government for it, wait for them to laugh and refuse, and then run to court and try to convince a judge to order the government to abide by its obligations. As a civil litigant, I have to write long, complicated demands for documents and information, wait a month for a response, get a response refusing most of what I asked for, engage in a letter-writing campaign, and eventually go to court seeking an order making the other side give me the documents, often months later.

Oh, to use the grand jury again! As a federal prosecutor, I could just issue grand jury subpoenas. I could refuse extensions at my whim. I could ask for whatever the hell I wanted based on the most remote suspicion that it might be relevant to a federal investigation. I could demand compliance with confidence, knowing that it is extraordinarily rare for a federal court to grant a target's motion to quash or limit a subpoena. And I could do all of this under the ridiculous fiction that I was acting on behalf of a grand jury so long as, occasionally, I stepped into the grand jury room and had a federal agent testify briefly that "Hey, we've got an investigation going into [vague subject], we issued subpoenas in your name, we got these documents, the investigation continues." 99% of the time, the grand jurors wouldn't look up from their newspapers, hoping they'd get let out early that day. Were the grand jurors a check on government abuse of the subpoena power? Don't make me laugh until I throw up.

And so yet another institution designed to protect us from government abuse effectively becomes a tool for government abuse.

Incidentally, Reynolds' organization, the Pain Relief Network, is no more. From the website:

The Members of the Board of Trustees and I have decided to shut down PRN as an activist organization because pressure from the US Department of Justice has made it impossible for us to function. I have fought back against the attack on me and PRN but have received no redress in the federal courts; so, the board and I have concluded that we simply cannot continue…

People in pain are still being abused, neglected, and, left to die by the entire system. Physicians brave enough to treat chronic pain continue to be intimidated and prosecuted. It breaks my heart that we have to stop, but there is simply no way forward for PRN.