
William Norman Grigg:
Obviously, this kind of power simply couldn’t be left in the hands of mere Mundanes. Accordingly, the term “presentment” was conspicuously absent from Rule 6 of the original Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which dealt with the role of the grand jury. Lester B Orfield, who served on the Advisory Committee, later explained that retaining the term “might encourage the use of the `run-away’ grand jury as the grand jury could act from their own knowledge or observation and not only from charges made by the United States attorney.”
“Today, the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor, who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury,” wrote federal District Judge William J. Campbell in a 1973 law journal article calling for formal abolition of the institution on the grounds of redundancy. This isn’t to say that the grand jury is considered useless by the prosecutorial caste: It helps maintain the pretense that prosecutors are servants of the public will.”