COUNTYWIDE : Judge Has No Plans for 2nd Grand Jury

The judge who oversees the work of the Ventura County Grand Jury says he doesn’t think the county needs a second panel, despite legislation signed this week by Gov. Pete Wilson.

“We don’t have any interest in working on it immediately,” said Edwin Osborne, presiding judge of the Ventura County Superior Court. “I did not see any problems last year. I have been keeping in touch with the grand jury with respect to what they are doing and their workload, and I don’t see a need to find a second grand jury.”

The bill signed by Wilson this week, which allows a second grand jury to be formed in the county, was written by state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita) at the request of the Ventura County district attorney’s office.

“We did get some complaints by last year’s grand jury,” Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin McGee said. “They were required to devote a lot of their resources to our cases. This legislation was introduced at our request because of the problems we had seen from last year’s grand jury.”

The county now has one grand jury, which looks into the workings of county and city government and makes indictments in criminal cases. If there were two grand juries in operation, one would fulfill the civil “watchdog” function of investigating local government agencies and the other would deal exclusively with criminal cases, McGee said.

The increased load on the grand jury system can be attributed in part to the passage last year of Proposition 115, McGee said. The Criminal Justice Reform Act, as it is known, provided prosecutors with the option of using a grand jury instead of going through the lengthier preliminary hearing process.

Lyle Wray, foreman for the 1990-91 grand jury, agrees with Osborne’s assessment, saying he is unaware of any work overload in the present system.

However, he said, “I would like to see a better cross-section of the spectrum of people who live in Ventura County. The way it is now, it’s difficult to get other than retired people to devote their time.”

The Ventura County Grand Jury consists of 19 volunteer county residents selected by the Superior Court judges for a one-year term.