Thanks for the clarification. I find it all very interesting and would have been happy to serve if the summons had come to me. The investigatory role is the intriguing part, of course, so I'm disappointed to hear that it is invoked so rarely.

I looked it up and found that a grand jury is required in cases that carry the highest possible penalty (life in prison in Minnesota), so that would include all first degree murders. I hadn't really stopped to think how many homicides there are every year in Minneapolis - somewhere between 50 and 100 as I recall. Does a grand jury have to consider every one of those, or just the ones that the County Attorney is considering charging as Murder 1?