16 Comments

1. 

   San Francisco? In this economy?

2. 

   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.'”

3. 

   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.

4. 

   Failures to secure indictments have been all the rage lately.
   Dick Tracy did the mattress trick 2 weeks back –

5. 

   Powers, thanks for documenting the ham sandwich bit!

6. 

   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?”.

7. 

   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.

8. 

   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.)

9. 

   Just to be extra clear: the “you…” in the first panel is meant as the beginning of “your list” (addressing his wife), before Beardo drops off to sleep. Or maybe it is the word “you” in its entirety, and then he is addressing the list.

   But I don’t think it’s too hard (or too nasty) to first hit on Dirk’s Arlo-ish reading, where “you..” in the first panel is the word in its entirety, and it is being addressed to his wife. (And again being carefully clear, “finish” would be understood in an intimacy sense, not in a murder sense!)

10. 

    For some reason, I thought the ‘indict a ham sandwich’ phrase was a Watergate-era thing. It was burned to a crisp on cable news shows years later.

11. 

    Don’t know the joke with the priest and rabbi Mitch is alluding to, but it did remind me of this syllogism:
    Nothing is better than eternal happiness
    A ham sandwich is better than nothing
    Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness
    QED

12. 

    Mitch4 – It never dawned on me the “you” referred to anything but the list. And I never got any sense at all there was even a hint of Arlo to it, but people do see things differently.

13. 

    As I recall, the grand jury system only considers evidence from the prosecution. I follow a YouTube channel that is live streams from a District court in rural Michigan. There they use probable cause hearings, where both sides present and the judge decides whether to bind over felony charges. Misdemeanor charges do not go through this process. As the standard is only preponderance of evidence, the majority of charges are sent forward. Sometimes defendants waive the hearing.

14. 

    TedD: I’m with you on this one!

    You know the old joke about the Rorshach test…

15. 

    Here’s a version of that joke:

    A priest and a rabbi are seated together on a plane…
    byu/Ralph-Hinkley inJokes

16. 

    When a prosecutor brings a weak or silly case just because the Emperor orders him to, well, I have to commend the grand jury for having the guts to stand up to it and do their duty.