Your Rights and Protections Against Overly Broad Grand Jury Subpoenas
Your Rights and Protections Against Overly Broad Grand Jury Subpoenas
Hey there! Dealing with a grand jury subpoena can be super stressful and confusing. As your lawyer, I wanna walk you through what your rights are, what protections you have, and how we can fight back against subpoenas that are just too darn broad.
First things first: what exactly is a grand jury subpoena? Basically, it’s a legal order for you to hand over information to a grand jury to help them decide whether or not to bring criminal charges against someone. Grand juries have like, a ton of power to demand all sorts of records and testimony. But that doesn’t mean they can just ask for anything they want!
The Fourth Amendment gives us some protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. And the courts have found that super broad, “fishing expedition” subpoenas violate that amendment. So we can totally challenge an overbroad subpoena on constitutional grounds if we need to. I’ll dig into the case law on that more below.
Another important right you have is to stay silent and not self-incriminate. That comes from the Fifth Amendment. If the subpoena is asking for information that could get you personally in legal trouble, you may be able to plead the Fifth and avoid testifying or handing over documents. More on that soon too!
Okay, let’s get into some specifics here. Say the subpoena is asking for all emails between you and another person for like, a five year period. That’s almost for sure overly broad. The courts have said subpoenas need to be limited to info that’s relevant to the investigation at hand. Five years of every email you sent is almost definitely asking for stuff that doesn’t matter.
We can file a motion to quash which basically asks the court to cancel the subpoena. To win, we’d argue it’s too broad and fishing-expedition-y. I’d pull up some cases like United States v. R. Enterprises where the court said subpoenas need to be reasonable and not just let the government go on a fishing trip through people’s personal stuff.
If the court agrees it’s unreasonable, they’ll quash it and the grand jury can’t make you hand over all those emails. But if they don’t agree, we may have to turn over the emails. That’s when it’s really important to know your Fifth Amendment rights.
See, the Fifth Amendment says nobody can be compelled to testify against themselves. So if handing over those emails would incriminate you personally or expose you to criminal liability, you may be able to refuse based on your Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
There’s some key Supreme Court cases here like United States v. Hubbell where the court said you can’t be forced to turn over incriminating documents. And Doe v. United States said the Fifth Amendment even protects stuff that could be used to lead investigators to incriminating evidence.
So if we fight the subpoena but lose, I’ll review all the emails and advise you on which ones are fair game to hand over and which ones you can refuse to provide based on the Fifth Amendment. That’s your constitutional right!
Now, sometimes the government will try to force you to comply anyway, which is totally not cool. If they try to hold you in contempt for taking the Fifth, we can go back to court and be like, “hey judge, they can’t do that!” The Supreme Court said in Kastigar v. United States that prosecutors can’t punish you for exercising your Fifth Amendment right.
There’s a lot more we could get into here, but hopefully this gives you a good overview of your main rights and protections if you get an overly broad subpoena from a grand jury. The key takeaways are:
- We can challenge it as unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment
- You may be able to stay silent on Fifth Amendment grounds
- They can’t retaliate if you refuse to comply based on the Fifth
And we have solid case law from the Supreme Court backing up all of those defenses. So don’t worry – we’ve got this! Let me know if you have any other questions. I know this stuff can be confusing but I’m here to help. We’ll get through this together!