LUDIC LOG

Our open and democratic culture is filled with wanna-be secret orders. Every Catholic school kid knows that the Apostle's Creed is the answer to the challenge at the Knights of Columbus initiation ceremony. Thanks to the Internet, we can read a sorority's entire ritual and view photos of Mormon temple garments.

What's left? The grand jury, a quasi-secret institution in the American legal system.

One sunny spring afternoon, my letter carrier presented me with a certified letter from the Cook County Grand Jury, calling me up for service. The first result of a Google search on the phrase "cook county grand jury" turned up www.blackbetsy.com, a Web site devoted to the memory of Shoeless Joe Jackson. But after a six-week stint as grand jury alternate, I know what goes on, and I can spill the goods like any disgruntled Chi Omega.

Most people are familiar with what lawyers call the petit jury ­ citizens get called in and are chosen for cases based on their ability to be fair and impartial. These jurors sit in the courtroom and hear both sides of a case, then decide if the defendant is guilty or not beyond a reasonable doubt. The grand jury is completely different. It is an artifact of British common law, originally serving as a layer between the king and the courts to ensure that there was reasonable evidence before bringing someone to trial.

In the United States, grand juries are supposed to investigate crimes, weigh the available evidence, and issue a true bill of indictment if they believe that a preponderance of evidence shows that a case should progress further in the court system, to a trial where it would be heard by a petit jury. It is one of several tools used by a prosecutor to pursue a case. Grand jury proceedings are secret, both during and after the jury's meeting, and the number of grand jurors is small ­ in many counties, a handful of people meet a few times over the course of a year and a half. Depending on what side of the law you favor, you may never in your entire life come across a grand juror.

Cook County boasts the largest consolidated court system in the United States. Its 2,400 employees and 400 judges handle 2.4 million cases a year. At any given time, Cook County has at least three grand juries seated; because they normally meet daily, the term lasts weeks instead of months and alternates are chosen to accommodate scheduling conflicts that the regular jurors may have. I was seated as an alternate on a special grand jury that met for a month and a half; of that time, I reported for five days of service. It was enough.

The Cook County Criminal Court complex, centered at 26th and California, stretches over several blocks to include the original courthouse, a high-rise administration building, the Cook County jail, and parking. The crowd is a mixture of slick defense lawyers, dowdy government staffers, and unironically thugged-out defendants ­ often with their families in tow. A lost visitor is struck by how well so many of the defendants know the courthouse routine.

We met in a generic, brown-and-rust trimmed conference room on the tenth floor of the administration building, tucked behind the court's psychiatric unit. Bookshelves lined one wall; best-selling thrillers, Harlequin romances, and out-of-date magazines left by earlier grand jurors were mixed in with decades-old psychiatric texts. Our days were spent playing cards, working crossword puzzles, and reviewing materials schlepped from our offices, occasionally punctuated by bursts of legal activity.

A lot has happened in Cook County since the 1918 Black Sox scandal, and much of it has been funneled through a grand jury. Maybe it's the sheer volume of cases in Cook County ­ five million people can get up to a lot of trouble ­ but the grand jury is nothing but a rubber stamp. The State's Attorney had pretty much decided what was going to trial and what wasn't. In fact, we were told the grand jury had denied a request for indictment only once in the prosecutor's memory.

Mostly, we heard drug cases ­ as many as thirty a morning, worked through quickly enough that we still had time to read the paper. Police officers would be called in by the jury's sergeant-at-arms, a tired young Hispanic man who worked nights for an employer that would not pay him during his jury service. The stone-faced cops sat as the State's Attorney read off the details of the arrest report. After a while, it seemed like we were trapped in a bizarre game of Clue, as inevitably the officer:

-served a warrant/did an undercover buy/responded to a citizen complaint

and found

-suspect cocaine /suspect heroin /suspect cannabis
-in the gym bag/on the table/in the glove compartment

along with

-guns/plastic zip-lock bags/milk sugar

and

-$500/$5000/$50,000 in U.S. currency.

In addition, suspect was within 1000 feet of a

- church/school/park

and

-had a criminal history record/had an outstanding warrant/was out on parole.

Inevitably, we voted to indict. Since the officer is under oath and we only heard one side of the story, we had no reason not to. I certainly wouldn't put it past a Chicago cop to lie, but I wasn't in a position to assess the truth. The petit jury that eventually hears the trial gets that job.

Besides issuing indictments, the grand jury's other task is to conduct investigations, but Nancy Drew never worked like this. Instead, the State's Attorney's office does the legwork, then asks the grand jury to issue a subpoena if required. For example, banks, casinos, and storage locker companies will only release certain records with a grand jury subpoena; lacking a reason not to, we issued the requested subpoenas. Likewise, people often testify under oath before a case comes to trial, which can help the prosecutor collect information and pressure a reluctant witness to talk. But often, we heard testimony in cases that we knew nothing about. While we had the right to ask questions, the state's attorney did all the talking.

The witnesses were usually nervous ­ they had probably seen something awful, they may have been worried about retribution, they knew they were having contact with the justice system. Furthermore, witnesses before the grand jury do not have the right to legal counsel; their lawyers, in the rare cases when they had them, could listen but not make comments or raise questions. But what was a scary novelty for them was quickly old hat for us. When you've heard six people recount more or less the same story, it's hard to keep away from the juicy novel in front of you. Were these witnesses insulted when the jurors didn't want to stop their game of hearts or look up from the reports they were editing? After all, we weren't going to make a decision about their case; we didn't even know enough about it to ask questions. We were there simply because the legal system required our warm bodies.

The powers that be like to say that people come out of jury service with respect for the legal system. That was not the case for me or most of my fellow grand jurors. One of my days as an alternate was during the last week that our jury sat. The regular jurors seemed overwhelming bitter at the time-consuming farce. "I'd rather be at work," said one, a government employee who was paid for her jury time. After all, one day we sat for four hours without hearing any cases; we were told that the judges were all at that U.S. Open, so no one was available to dismiss us. That, more than our princely daily fee of $17.20, showed just how much the legal system valued our time.

I'm not allowed to discuss the cases that we heard. I missed out on seeing the R. Kelly video; another Cook County grand jury got that diversion. Instead, I heard a child testify in a murder case. He appeared one day after his birthday. When he said his date of birth, I nearly broke out in tears. No child should have to do that. Grand jury service sucks, but it's hardly the worst thing that happens to the citizens of Cook County.