Kansas law permitting a citizen's grand jury dates to days of "frontier justice" and prohibition

Peter Kendall reports for the Washington Post from Lindsborg, Kansas (population 3,458), home to Bethany College.  The story is about Madison Smith, who has just graduated from Bethany.  Smith was raped by a fellow student on campus a few years ago, but when the local prosecutor failed to press the case against her rapist, Smith used a little-known Kansas law to convene a grand jury to consider this matter.  That grand jury will meet this fall.  Here's an excerpt from Keller's story, with a focus on the 1887 law:  

But Smith invoked a vestige of frontier justice that allows citizens in Kansas to summon a grand jury when they think prosecutors are neglecting to bring charges in a crime. The law, dating to the 1800s, was originally used to go after saloonkeepers when authorities ignored violations of statewide prohibition. The 22-year-old graduate is believed to be the first to convene a citizen grand jury after a prosecutor declined to pursue a sex-crime charge.

Only five other states, all in the Great Plains or the West, have similar laws still on the books. The Kansas statute requires an individual to gather a certain number of signatures of support....

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A state appeals court looking into [the law's] origins cited contemporary newspaper reports saying it was intended to aid citizens frustrated with prosecutors who refused to enforce temperance laws. It was quickly successful, according to an 1889 story in the Topeka Capital-Commonwealth: “As soon as the first grand jury met, every whisky joint, about seventy-five in the county, and every drug store selling without a license had disappeared.”

“Kansas has the lowest threshold for bringing one of these petitions, so it makes it easy for someone who has an agenda to bring one,” said Marissa Hotujac, a Kansas attorney who as a law student published a legal journal article on citizen grand juries.

To convene the grand jury, the Smiths needed 329 voter signatures — 2 percent of the county’s vote total in the last gubernatorial election, plus 100 — and to have a court approve the legal grounds.

Can't help think about how the process outlined in this law plays out differently in relatively low-population counties like McPherson (population 29,000), where Lindsborg is.  Here, it meant just 329 voter signatures were necessary.   And that's to say nothing of the impact of the lack of anonymity that marks rural places, especially in a case like this one where an allegation of sexual assault was at stake.  Keller's story notes that Smith had "to relive her trauma over and over in conversations with strangers."  But it probably also meant she had to relive the trauma repeatedly in conversations with people she and her family knew.