Oct. 16, 2005
 
THUMBS XLV: Nothing Grand About Grand Juries; Gadzooks! Finally a Manageable Wall Street Journal Will Make Its Appearance; If the Economy is So Great, Why Are All Those People Lining Up to File for Bankruptcy?
 
By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
 
Hinton, WV (HNN) –This is the forty-fifth installment of a column expressing approval or disapproval of recent news events, commentaries, etc. Thumbs Up for approval; Thumbs Down for disapproval. This is your column as much as mine; I welcome contributions, which will be credited in the item. The contributions can come from within the HNN family or from our readers – I welcome them all. Contact me at davidkinchen@hotmail.com or send the contributions/suggestions to stories@huntingtonnews.net.
 
THUMBS DOWN – To grand juries, so called because they have more members (usually 25) than regular 12-person juries. There’s nothing grand about grand juries, which were abolished by the country that originated them -- the United Kingdom -- in the 1930s and have been abolished by many states in the U.S. The spectacle of the Travis County (Texas) grand jury indicting U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-TX, should serve as the latest example of a once good idea – perhaps 300 years ago – gone haywire. I’m not a big fan of DeLay, but there are other ways of bringing him down than the travesty of the grand jury. According to Wikipedia: “Some argue that the grand jury is unjust as the defendant is not represented by counsel and/or does not have the right to call witnesses. Intended to serve as a check on prosecutors, the opportunity it presents them to compel testimony can in fact prove useful in building up the case they will present at the final trial.”
 
Just try to find a grand jury anywhere that acts in a manner not orchestrated by the prosecutor. Judge Sol Wachtler, the former Chief Judge of New York state, was quoted as saying, "A grand jury would indict a turkey sandwich" if the prosecutor told the jurors to do it. In response to past abuse, many jurisdictions in the United States have replaced the formality of a grand jury with a procedure in which the prosecutor can issue charges by filing an information (also known as an accusation) which is followed by a preliminary hearing before a judge at which both the defendant and his or her counsel are present.
 
I’m no lawyer – and I haven’t even played one on TV – but I’ve covered trials and have been on juries in my former state of California. In what sounds like something out of a John Grisham or Scott Turow novel, there is the now rare phenomenon of a “runaway grand jury.” This happened when the grand jury does break with the prosecutor – even excluding the prosecutor from its meetings and subpoena witnesses and issue indictments on its own. Again, according to Wikipedia: “Runaway grand juries sometimes happen in government corruption or organized crime cases, if the grand jury comes to believe that the prosecutor himself has been improperly influenced. They were common in the 19th century but have become rare since the 1930s.” Let’s do away with grand juries and follow the lead of the mother country. Mother does know best in this instance.
 
THUMBS UP – To The Wall Street Journal, for deciding to reduce its web size from 60 inches to a more manageable 48-inch size, now the industry standard, by January 2007. What are we talking about? A newspaper that’s easier to handle, that’s what. Reading the Wall Street Journal is like folding a bed sheet and it becomes a lethal weapon if you’re reading it on a train or plane. Opened up, a Wall Street Journal is a hefty 30 inches wide, compared with 24 inches for the Charleston Gazette, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph or the (Beckley) Register-Herald.
 
Newspapers were all like The Wall Street Journal a few decades ago. They began shrinking to save on newsprint, most of which is imported from Canada:
 
The $43 million project is expected to result in yearly savings of about $18 million in operating expenses, mainly for newsprint, beginning in 2007, according to an Oct. 11, 2005 Journal story about the changes.
 
Dow Jones, the parent firm of the Journal, previously announced that the Journal's international editions will run in a compact size beginning Oct. 17 and have greater ties to WSJ.com. In addition to The Wall Street Journal and its international and online editions, Dow Jones publishes Dow Jones Newswires and other newswires, Barron's, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Dow Jones Indexes and the Ottaway group of community newspapers. Dow Jones is also co-owner with Reuters Group of Factiva, and with Hearst of SmartMoney.
 
The Journal recently started a weekend Saturday/Sunday paper with several new features. In my opinion, The Wall Street Journal is one of the world’s great newspapers. In its new compact format, it will become even easier to read. Kudos to all at Dow Jones! Perhaps the next big step will be to go all the way to a tabloid format, my absolute favorite for newspapers.
 
THUMBS DOWN – To conventional wisdom, as expressed in the news media, that the U.S. economy is hunky-dory for just about everyone. I believe the average Joe and Josephine Six-Pack is worse off now than he/she was 30-40 years ago – and things are getting worse with skyrocketing property taxes, energy costs and just about everything, while incomes are declining in real terms and cost of living adjustments for Social Security aren’t even close to being fair.
 
If the economy is so great, why is the Associated Press reporting that hundreds of consumers across the nation jammed courthouses Friday, Oct. 14, 2005 to file bankruptcy petitions to beat the “start of a new federal law that sets stricter standards for seeking protection from creditors”? AP Writer Sandy Shore: “Residents arrived before dawn at U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Denver and a line of more than 300 stretched outside the building before noon. Some pushed babies in strollers while others nibbled on breakfast burritos or sipped coffee, resigned to a long wait.”
 
The new law, the most sweeping reform of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in decades, takes effect Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, setting new limits on personal bankruptcy filing and requiring people to get professional credit counseling before they may file petitions, Shore writes. It will prohibit most filers with above-average income from filing Chapter 7 petitions that allow debts to wipe out.
 
Instead, people deemed by a "means test" to have at least $100 a month left over after paying certain debts and expenses will have to submit a five-year repayment plan under the more restrictive Chapter 13.
 
More vignettes from the real world, courtesy of Sandy Shore:
 
* The bankruptcy court in Atlanta was so crowded that only people with bankruptcy paperwork were being allowed on the floor where the court is.
 
* A federal bankruptcy court clerk in New York city said several hundred people have shown up, filling three or four court rooms.
 
* Across the nation, about 100,000 petitions were filed in the first three days this week, according to Burlingame, Calif.-based Lundquist Consulting, which compiles bankruptcy statistics. The firm said 102,863 were filed last week, a record expected to fall.
 
For more information: U.S. Bankruptcy Court:
http://www.uscourts.gov/bankruptcycourts.html