With the emergence of U.S. Constitution focus groups in North Carolina comes their different strategies on reasserting what they say are breached liberties.
The WNCFreedom2020 group in Asheville, North Carolina, has convened a Grand Jury of the People, according to its founders, pursuant to the 1215 Magna Carta and the North Carolina State Constitution, to question the authority of the Buncombe County Commissioners and Board of Education’s COVID-19 policies.
According to the documents, a people’s civil grand jury is recognized as the authority on correcting, admonishing, and reining in “tyrannical actions” of government.
Kay Olsen, WNCFreedom2020’s secretary, told The Epoch Times, “There are four branches of government: the judicial, legislative, and executive branch. Then there’s ‘We the People.’ Somehow, the other three branches have forgotten that we put them there.”
Olsen referred to a quote from the late Antonin Scalia, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1986 until 2016.
The quote comes from his opinion in the case of United States vs. Williams, a 1992 ruling during which the purpose of the grand jury was debated surrounding a hearing in which exculpatory evidence had been withheld from the grand jury, a decision that might not have led to indictment based on that evidence, according to the defendant.
Scalia says that the grand jury is alluded to in the Bill of Rights, but not in the U.S. Constitution, and has not been “textually assigned” to any of the branches in the first three Articles.
“In fact, the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the government and the people,” Scalia says.
Thus, the citizens have an “unbridled right” to create their own grand juries, Scalia says, and present “true bills of indictment” to a court that can lead to criminal proceedings.
“Our Founding Fathers presciently thereby created a ‘buffer’ the people may rely upon for justice, when public officials, including judges, criminally violate the law,” Scalia says.
Findings of the Grand Jury
The group published three findings in its civil grand jury specifically directed at the Buncombe County State Government in Asheville, North Carolina.
The jury said that the state has no authority to mandate masks or vaccinations in its school system and demanded…
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