Given that, I thought I would jump right to some suggestions for improving grand juries.  I should preface this by saying its not clear to me they should be kept.  Probable cause hearings in open court may be a better alternative from a social justice perspective.  And there may be other alternatives.  But I'm not sure we should give up on grand juries (where they are still used) and I am not sure we could scrap them if we wanted to.  Another preface, perhaps too obvious: as a non-practitioner, I am far from an expert about these things.  Perhaps an outsider perspective can help though.

I think there are 2 basic problem areas with grand juries: what the DA's office does (or doesn't) do and the normal human tendency (of grand jurors) to do as the authority figure says.

On the first day of my grand jury service, when the judge swore us in, he indicated we were bound to accept the law as it is and vote true bill (i.e., indict) or not based solely on whether we thought there was probable cause for the charge as stated.