Professor Robert Weisberg weighs in recents calls for the grand jury records in the Eric Garner case to be made public and why in New York that it unlikely to happen. 

For three hours last month, in a crowded courtroom in Staten Island, lawyers sparred before a New York Supreme Court Justice about the case of Eric Garner, a forty-three-year-old who died last summer when a plainclothes police officer named Daniel Pantaleo choked him during an arrest. In December, a grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, despite seemingly irrefutable evidence of misconduct in the form of a widely circulated video of the incident shot by a bystander and the findings of a medical examiner who identified neck and chest compression as the cause of death. The question currently before the Staten Island court is a narrow one, with important consequences: Can the materials from the grand-jury proceeding be made public so that we can understand why, and how, grand jurors arrived at their decision?

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New York follows federal norms on grand juries, which are “ruthlessly rigorous” about secrecy, Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor, told me. This means that the petitioners face a difficult task in convincing state Supreme Court Justice William E. Garnett, the judge assigned to rule on the request, to override secrecy considerations. One state judge, who asked to remain anonymous, told me, “There is no legal precedent in New York that gives a road map for how to depart from grand-jury secrecy.”