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No, I did not ignore that statement. I saw correctly that it is not as strong as the declarative statement that Scalia used to lay down the law for the lower courts.

That statement you cling to is a weaker statement as it declares nothing, it is a description of what has evolved, not what must be adhered to.

The lower courts had fallen into a practice where they would dictate to a grand jury what was and was not a valid indictment. Scalia set them straight.

Scalia’s statement that I posted more than once and once directly to you is the weighty statement. Here it is again:

“The grand jury requires no authorization from its constituting court to initiate an investigation, nor does the prosecutor require leave of court to seek a grand jury indictment.”

That is a ***declarative*** statement, much stronger than the descriptive background status statement used to describe the way things evolved without regard to the Constitution.

His usage of the phrases “requires no authorization ... nor require”; those phrases are not accidental. He is using the statement you cling to which begins with the qualifier “although” to draw attention that ‘although the way things are now, they evolved beyond what was meant so that now the view of a grand jury is not aligned with the Constitution. He goes on to say that the grand jury is in the Bill of Rights but not in the Articles, therefore not under the jurisdiction of any government branch, yet prosecutors and courts seem to think a grand jury cannot exist outside of their sphere.

So again, and for the last time, grand juries are to find evidence of wrongdoing, to make indictments based on the evidence, not to determine guilt or innocence, and these activities can take place on their own without a court or prosecutor. If such a grand jury writes a report citing key evidence for an indictment of a person of interest, a prosecutor cannot ignore the indictment unless they too are in on it or derelict.

The natural tendency of grand juries to cluster around courts and prosecutor offices is to take advantage of the subpoena power of courts. That power is quite useful and so it is not surprising that over time courts have come to think a grand jury is an appendage of the court.