Grand Jury Achievement

Download the Grand Jury Achievement short form

Download the Grand Jury Acheivement full form

One of the most important goals adopted by the Board last year is to concentrate on that part of the CGJA mission statement where we seek to educate the California public about our unique California Grand Jury system.

We have come to the conclusion that what we can have is a closed-loop system involving the entire Grand Jury process as follows:

It starts with documenting and publicizing grand jury achievements, defined briefly as a grand jury report that achieves a positive improvement on a local government operation.
By publicizing this good work, we can then hope to recruit a larger and better pool of prospective jurors.
We then will seek to provide them improved training by a combination of our training seminars, our on-site training and encouraging in any possible way improved local training.
This improved training then results in grand jury reports that create even greater improvements in local government.
We then close the loop by documenting these improved operations, perhaps even in the long run, documenting the statistics of these improvements.

This process should be a collaborative effort among CGJA, its chapters, independent associations including any group of former grand jurors, CGJA members, all grand juries and the court administrative staffs that support them and wherever possible the media.

For step 1, we have developed a process to document grand jury achievements and now seek to test this process. First, we have defined a “Grand Jury Achievement” as a grand jury recommendation that gains acceptance by the agency and for which a verified beneficial result can be shown. We have developed two forms to collect this information with the long-term goal of being able to catalog and search the information for a variety of reasons. Please log on to either the “short” or “full” form by clicking on the link at the top of this page. The “full” form is appropriate where there is more than one supported recommendation in the same report. The instructions for either form may be found as page 2 of the “full” form.

Please contact Jerry Lewi at cgjaprguy@roadrunner.com for more information. We especially encourage chapters and other associations to take this effort up as a project. Any completed forms should be sent to Jerry. If you feel you can’t fill all the boxes, don’t worry about it – we are seeking any raw data we can get our hands on.