Assessing The Grand Jury’s Secrets
We attended District Attorney Holly Carnright’s press event on the final results of the county’s six month Grand Jury investigation into the county jail debacle a couple of weeks ago. The mood in the room, filled with reporters from as far away as Albany and New York City, was deadly serious and not a little contentious.
Carnright, standing before a table piled high with boxed papers, noted that as a public lawyer, he had strict guidelines for what he could do. Only a small portion of what was uncovered ended up involving broken laws. That resulted in the indictment of former Public Works and Highway commissioner Harvey Sleight on misdemeanor charges that could possibly land him in jail for a year, but will likely mean a fine. As for the rest — including the leadership of former legislative chairmen Danny Alfonso, Ward Todd and Richard Gerentine, and the advice of former county attorney Frank Murray — it seems no laws were broken. Lots of bad decisions, yes… but nothing anyone could get hammered for.
It has been said countless times over the years that bad governance, which covers such faulty decision-making, gets handled in our system by the political process. Sure, that means real reform tends to take much longer than most people want, and in softer, more spun ways than is really effective. But it’s the way things work, and the reason we have grand juries such as the one that ended with such a sputter in recent weeks.
It’s also the reason such grand juries have always been controversial. They were founded as a means of looking into charges of bad governance to separate the political from the criminal. But being reined in by sealed reports, they never quite achieve the level of reform they were established for in the first place. They look good but achieve little.
The disappointment in the stunningly designed new jail lobby when Carnright held his recent press conference was based more on the fact that the pile of paper in front of everyone was being sealed than any averted bloodletting. The question on everyone’s minds had to do with finding ways of learning lessons from bad governance… not just as related to the timeline of how things went so wrong with this project, but the human means by which things got out of control.
Everyone wanted a narrative instead of a timeline… a story involving individual characters’ motivations and regrets. The minutiae that came up in hours of testimony. The contradictions and raw humanity of how government works. But all that is now off-limits to viewing… forever.
You’d think that once people are given the public’s trust, they are henceforth required to open their public lives to that same public while in office. It seems part of the job agreed to upon election, or appointment, much more than the sorts of private life queries and investigations that have become the stuff of endless cable news programs in recent years.
But our laws don’t reflect that… yet. And so we never really learn what to look for in our leaders’ foibles except via backroom conjecture. Which can be corrosive.
The problem with our system is that it’s based on the 19th Century Progressive ideal that things keep getting better of their own accord and looking back only creates acrimony and discord… and that such things are basically “unpatriotic.” And yet the means by which past wrongs are corrected is more difficult.
Carnright did his job doing what he could within the Grand Jury system. So did the new legislative majority in asking for such an investigation.
But getting to a point where we don’t repeat such mistakes on a local or national basis will take concerted effort to be more open with our government, and investigations into it. The fact that the present Grand Jury system is so wishy-washy is what continues its controversial nature.
To face the challenges that lie ahead for us all as a changing nation, we have to be able to do better.
Fortunately, all the problems our misbegotten jail caused us pale compared to the mess we may be in on a federal level. Which means that, in the end, new methods for getting at such challenges will likely have to work themselves out sooner than later.
Just like they did back when the present systems were first put into place…
We move on. PS