Ohio

please look at those cases for issues with the prosecutors handling them. They are always because a grand jury failed to indict, not because of qualified immunity.

And this is how I know you have either fallen for the propaganda or you’re arguing in bad faith. A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich for murder if the prosecutor wanted them to do so. The prosecutor has full control over what evidence the grand jury does or does not see. And there is no defense attorney present to argue against indictment. The prosecutor can intentionally exclude exculpatory evidence, include hearsay (and other types of evidence that would be excluded from a trial,) etc… Lastly, the threshold for indictment is laughably low, because it’s basically just the jurors going “yeah it looks like there’s enough evidence to bother with a trial.

To be clear, the grand jury is just an arm of the prosecutor. The district attorney can decide to prosecute even without a grand jury indictment, but that isn’t always politically advantageous. Since district attorneys are typically elected officials, they need to worry about the optics of whether or not they charge someone, while also trying to maintain a positive working relationship with the courts and police.

Let’s say the public wants to see a trial after a cop kills someone. The DA doesn’t want to prosecute them, because the police union has vowed to stop cooperating with investigations if the cop is prosecuted. But the public wants to see a trial, and it’s an election year for the DA. They’ll fall back to the grand jury as an excuse. They’ll go to the grand jury and bring no evidence, (because again, they have full control over what evidence the jury is allowed to see).

When the grand jury fails to indict because they were given no evidence to indict with, the DA can then jump in front of the news cameras and go “oh woe is me, I tried SO hard to prosecute them but the mean and nasty grand jury refused to indict! My hands are tied! But I really did try to prosecute, so remember to vote for me!”

And the inverse is also true: Maybe a big case is in the news and the DA needs to look strong. Maybe a pretty white girl went missing and was found dead after a big public search. They can literally frame someone for the crime, and since the DA has full control over the evidence, the grand jury will happily indict them even if they’re clearly innocent. Maybe the DA has DNA evidence proving that the person wasn’t who rapemurdered the girl. But the DA doesn’t care if they’re actually innocent, because that’s what the trial is for; They just need a trial to look like they’re working on solving the case.