54
Opinion of the Court
"No case has been cited, nor have we been able to find any, furnishing an authority for looking into and revising the judgment of the grand jury upon the evidence, for the purpose of determining whether or not the finding was founded upon sufficient proof, or whether there was a deficiency in respect to any part of the complaint . . . ." United States v. Reed, 27 F. Cas. 727, 738 (No. 16,134) (CC NDNY 1852).
We accepted Justice Nelson's description in Costello v. United States, where we held that "[i]t would run counter to the whole history of the grand jury institution" to permit an indictment to be challenged "on the ground that there was inadequate or incompetent evidence before the grand jury." 350 U. S., at 363-364. And we reaffirmed this principle recently in Bank of Nova Scotia, where we held that "the mere fact that evidence itself is unreliable is not sufficient to require a dismissal of the indictment," and that "a challenge to the reliability or competence of the evidence presented to the grand jury" will not be heard. 487 U. S., at 261. It would make little sense, we think, to abstain from reviewing the evidentiary support for the grand jury's judgment while scrutinizing the sufficiency of the prosecutor's presentation. A complaint about the quality or adequacy of the evidence can always be recast as a complaint that the prosecutor's presentation was "incomplete" or "misleading." 8 Our words in Costello bear repeating: Review of facially
8 In Costello, for example, instead of complaining about the grand jury's reliance upon hearsay evidence the petitioner could have complained about the prosecutor's introduction of it. See, e. g., United States v. Estepa, 471 F. 2d 1132, 1136-1137 (CA2 1972) (prosecutor should not introduce hearsay evidence before grand jury when direct evidence is available); see also Arenella, Reforming the Federal Grand Jury and the State Preliminary Hearing to Prevent Conviction Without Adjudication, 78 Mich. L. Rev. 463, 540 (1980) ("[S]ome federal courts have cautiously begun to . . . us[e] a revitalized prosecutorial misconduct doctrine to circumvent Costello's prohibition against directly evaluating the sufficiency of the evidence presented to the grand jury").
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