Grand Jury-Rigged

I wrote about a grand jury irregularity in my last letter to Mike Anderson, and I want to talk a little more about that today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_juries_in_the_United_States

Assuming I understand this correctly, before you get tried for anything more than a misdemeanor in Texas, you must first be indicted by a grand jury; that’s 23 people, before whom the prosecutor brings all the evidence gathered against a person. That person is not allowed to be present, or to even know that they’re the subject of an investigation (although if you’ve been arrested, you probably do.) Their defense lawyer is not allowed to be there, and there is no requirement that any exculpatory evidence needs to be presented.

A widely accepted aphorism states, “A good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.” It’s a commentary on how the process, which is supposed to protect citizens from unnecessary legal action, is stacked heavily in favor of the prosecutor. If they want to see that person hauled into court they can make it happen; guilt or innocence doesn’t really enter into it.

We know that Coy received multiple indictments, and only one was ever brought to trial. But here's the timeline: December 2001: Coy receives two indictments, one for Jill Odom's case and one for Jane Doe's. On March 6th of the following year, he's indicted on two more counts, one of those being the girl who claimed they drove to a hotel and had unprotected sex, miraculously failing to infect him with her STD. 

That's all I can find records of; we know that they brought in multiple women to testify that they had been abused during the punishment phase of the trial, but I'm not finding records. 8 women, that's the number that's constantly being thrown around...but I can find only four indictments. 

Why is this significant? We talked about this a little before; when Pat Lykos took office, the number of ‘no bills’ (indictments refused) skyrocketed. Which means prosecutors where bringing cases they thought they could win, but the grand juries were slapping them down. While the media painted this as Pat Lykos being soft on crime, it’s possible that she simply wasn’t using the grand jury process as a rubber stamp anymore; maybe by choice, or maybe she just didn’t have connections to the good ol’ boy network like Rosenthal did.

This is something I haven't really looked into before, so it's going to take awhile before I can come out with a coherent point about it;I think it merits further research, though. What was the state of the grand jury process during Rosenthal's administration? How many times was Coy indicted, and when were those handed down?