Pre-Indictment

Movement claim: A criminal defendant has a pre-indictment right to be notified of grand jury proceedings, to challenge the array of the grand jury before it is seated, and to participate in grand jury selection; modern federal practice that compresses or skips Rule 3 and Rule 4 violates the Fifth Amendment grand jury clause — foreclosed

Grand juries have been ex parte secret bodies for centuries. Costello v. United States (1956) forecloses challenges to indictment validity based on grand jury composition. There is no pre-indictment participation right and never has been. But the movement's underlying descriptive observation — that modern federal practice routinely skips the Rule 3 / Rule 4 sequence in favor of direct indictment — is empirically accurate, and the seed is preserved at the end.