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Grand Juries The site below will provide you with a great deal of information concerning the history, purpose and operation of grand juries at both the federal and state levels. After reviewing this information answer the following questions. What are the major differences between a grand jury and a petit or regular jury? What was the historical purpose of the grand jury? Based on what you have just read do you believe that the grand jury still performs its historical functions? What are the major criticisms of the grand jury?http://www.udayton.edu/~grandjur/ John Hinkley Review the materials from the site below on the attempted assassination of President Reagan by John Hinkley.http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hinckleytrial.html Answers to common questions about the insanity defense can be found at the site below. http://www.psych.org/public_info/insanity.cfm Beckwith Information on the assassination of Medgar Evers by Byron de la Beckwith may be found on the following site.http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/evers_medgar/ Information about the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission is at the following location. http://www.upress.state.ms.us/catalog/fall2001/the_mississippi_state_sovereignty_commission.html The period between the assassination of Medgar Evers and the conviction of Beckwith was thirty-one years. What issues does this raise concerning a fair trial? The refusal of earlier juries to convict Beckwith may have been examples of jury nullification. To read about jury nullification go to the following site. http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/p/jph13/JuryNullification.html The Beckwith case was one of several which stemmed from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s in which sympathetic juries or judges refused to convict persons accused of violence toward civil rights activists. Another was related to the deaths of Mickey Schwermer, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney, three activists murdered by law enforcement officers in 1964. The officer was tried in federal court for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three youth. There, however, Judge William Harold Cox, a judge of the United States District Court and a white supremacist, reduced the charge to a misdemeanor. The government then appealed to the Supreme Court. In each of the above cases it might be argued that justice was delayed or thwarted because much of the community, and ultimately jury members selected from those communities, agreed with the positions of the defendants over that of the state.
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