In honor of the Olympics (yes, I know track and field is in the summer Olympics)
Mitch4 sends this in: “Probably no longer an in-joke of lawyers, but it used to be said of a good prosecutor that they “could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich”.”
Dirk the Daring sends this in as a possible Arlo: “Perhaps the first panel deserves an Arlo award. It stopped me for a moment before I got to the second panel. I would have trouble believing this is accidental.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
San Francisco? In this economy?
I thought the ham sandwich idea was that grand jury proceedings are so tilted in favor of the government that any competent prosecutor should be able to secure an indictment of a ham sandwich.
(After doing some brief research…)
The original quotation is from New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachtler in 1985, just after his appointment. Here’s the New York Daily News from that year: “In a bid to make prosecutors more accountable for their actions, Chief Justice Sol Wachtler has proposed that the state scrap the grand jury system of bringing criminal indictments. Wachtler, who became the state’s top judge earlier this month, said district attorneys now have so much influence on grand juries that ‘by and large’ they could get them to ‘indict a ham sandwich.'”
I left my heart in San Fransisco
My kidneys in Japan
I left my liver on the Yellow river
Now I’m only half a man.
Failures to secure indictments have been all the rage lately.
Dick Tracy did the mattress trick 2 weeks back –
Powers, thanks for documenting the ham sandwich bit!
And speaking of ham sandwich, in the joke about the old friends a priest and a rabbi, the punch line could use anything treyf but I always think of it as “And it was better than a ham sandwich, eh?”.
What Powers said, plus prosecutors don’t generally go to a grand jury unless they have a strong case. It’s not like they don’t have more than enough cases to fill their days, and losing is bad, so they move the ones forward that are clear winners.
Just want to point out that collegiate track and field is currently in season, unlike the Summer Olympics.
(Also, sorry Dirk, but that’s a reading only a 14-year-old boy would love. It’s extremely obviously not intentional. I would go so far as to say sharing the thought is socially inappropriate.)