March 18, 2005
(Updated) Officer-Involved Shooting Grand Jury Records Could Be Opened
Will Attorney General's Proposal Be Retroactive?
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
On the front page of today's Oregonian, they offer an early glimpse at a set of proposals coming out of the office of Attorney General Hardy Myers regarding officer-involved shootings. Amongst those proposals is one for which many people have been pushing.
Myers will ask the Legislature to require that transcripts of grand jury testimony in cases involving officers who use deadly force be made public, unless the officer is indicted or some other compelling reason is shown, according to a draft of a report he will issue next week.
This proposal, unsurprisingly, is not particularly popular with some parties, one of which (yet again) should be familiar to our readers.
Task force member Robert King, president of the Portland Police Association, does not support Myers' plan to make grand jury testimony public in cases of police use of deadly force.
"For those people who are skeptical about the grand jury process, I don't think this solves that," King said at a recent meeting. "We then become second-guessed through this transparency."
Our own interest in opening grand jury records regarding officer-involved shootings, of course, stems from our coverage of the jury of inquest which Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk conducted after last year's officer-involved shooting death of James Jahar Perez.
As a result of that coverage, we pointed to questions about Schrunk's handling of the inquest, and urged that he be recalled from office -- especially if he handled the grand jury in the same manner.
More recently, we repeated our call to unseal the grand jury records from that shooting, since that is the only way to determine whether or not Schrunk had skewed the presentation of the evidence there in the same way he did during the inquest.
All of which is the "second-guessing through transparency" of which Robert King seems so afraid. And perhaps with good reason. While no one should be surprised if a district attorney offers to a grand jury a presentation of the evidence which might skew in a given direction, one would normally expect that skew to lean towards trying to obtain an indictment.
If Schrunk handled the Perez shooting grand jury in the same way in which he handled the inquest, it would easily be argued that the opposite was true: He skewed the presentation of the evidence to lean away from obtaining an indictment.
And the public has every right in the world to know whether or not that was the case. It's precisely the sort of potentially-improper (ethically, if not legally) behavior on the part of an elected official which transparency is meant to out.
According to today's story in The Oregonian, the draft of Myers' proposal includes the following general statement about accountability: "We believe the district attorney should be held politically accountable to the community for the quality of his or her decision about peace officer use of deadly force."
That kind of political accountability is impossible without the transparency which Robert King would prefer to prevent.
Given the forthcoming proposals from the Attorney General, then, our question is simple: If adopted, will the new rules regarding grand jury records apply only to grand juries convened after the adoption of those rules, or will they apply retroactively, permitting the records of prior grand juries to be unsealed?
Unfortunately, we sent that question to the Attorney General's office today, on a Friday, so we don't expect a response on that matter until after the weekend.
Update
For what it's worth, that Oregonian article says that Myers' proposals are going to be folded into an existing Senate bill on the same issues. SB 301 is scheduled for a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 24, at the State Capitol in Room 343, beginning at 1:00 PM. We may try to attend.
From our very cursory look through that bill (a very, very cursory look), we don't imagine that its provisions would apply retroactively, but we can't say either way with any certainty.