It's a grand jury, which I think is mostly an American thing, and like most uniquely American things, doesn't really make a lot of sense.
We don't try cases, we look at preliminary evidence and decide if the case is good enough to even bother with a trial. I don't think Australia has a direct equivalent but it's a sort of a preliminary hearing. Prosecutors can also subpoena witnesses to testify under oath in front of a grand jury in order to gather evidence to figure out if it's even worth asking the jury to indict, so we're also spending a fair amount of time just listening to witnesses in cases where we may not ever even decide anything.
I can talk about procedural and general stuff like the above but can't even hint at any specific cases; grand juries have even stronger secrecy rules than petit juries, because in some cases the fact that the case is even being investigated is secret until after the indictments, and since often nobody's even in custody yet, breaking secrecy can be really dangerous for everyone involved, too.
Because of that, we don't have just one case, we look at lots of cases. Yesterday we heard, iirc, more that half a dozen witnesses from almost as many different cases. Since it's a Federal grand jury, we only look at federal criminal cases, but I think federal crimes in the US and Australia are pretty similar. It can be anything from minor workplace safety regulatory violations to child sex trafficking rings, and we can hear cases over the whole range in one day. (Which I think is a large part of why it's so exhausting when we do a whole day!)
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We don't try cases, we look at preliminary evidence and decide if the case is good enough to even bother with a trial. I don't think Australia has a direct equivalent but it's a sort of a preliminary hearing. Prosecutors can also subpoena witnesses to testify under oath in front of a grand jury in order to gather evidence to figure out if it's even worth asking the jury to indict, so we're also spending a fair amount of time just listening to witnesses in cases where we may not ever even decide anything.
I can talk about procedural and general stuff like the above but can't even hint at any specific cases; grand juries have even stronger secrecy rules than petit juries, because in some cases the fact that the case is even being investigated is secret until after the indictments, and since often nobody's even in custody yet, breaking secrecy can be really dangerous for everyone involved, too.
Because of that, we don't have just one case, we look at lots of cases. Yesterday we heard, iirc, more that half a dozen witnesses from almost as many different cases. Since it's a Federal grand jury, we only look at federal criminal cases, but I think federal crimes in the US and Australia are pretty similar. It can be anything from minor workplace safety regulatory violations to child sex trafficking rings, and we can hear cases over the whole range in one day. (Which I think is a large part of why it's so exhausting when we do a whole day!)