Grand Jury Set To Meet In Beavercreek Walmart%

XENIA -- The grand jury is one of the few things in our legal system that is secret. No one will be allowed to listen to the testimony or hear the evidence presented by the special prosecutor, Mark Piepmeier, who is from the Cincinnati area. However, the accused will not be present during the hearing. So the officer will not have the chance to refute any claims made by the prosecutor. "The prosecution really has no requirement to introduce evidence that could ex culpate or show the opposite of what the government is presenting. They have no responsibility to do that," said Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a law professor at the University of Dayton. The grand jury in the case of the fatal shooting Aug. 5 at the Beacreek Walmart will consist of nine randomly picked registered Greene County voters. They will decide if there is probable cause to move forward with criminal charges for the death of John Crawford III. Grand jury hearings are typically held in secret and not announced to the public until after an indictment has been handed down. That is a precaution put into the constitution to protect the accused. "Someone said, after their aquittal, where do I go to get my name back? Because if you're convicted you're on the front page, if you're aquitted you're, depending on the person, usually somewhere in the back pages," said Hoffmeister. However, with the attention the shooting has gained nationwide, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine decided to bring in an outside investigator. ABC 22/FOX 45 wanted to know how much people knew about the grand jury and the process behind it. We spoke Friday with nearly 30 people in the Dayton area. More than half had a general idea as to how everything worked. The biggest misconception was that both sides presented their evidence. The grand jury will decide if there is a "true bill." That means they think a crime was committed. It can also return a "no true bill," which means the prosecution didn't have enough to prove its case.