A grand jury is convening, likely this month according to familiar sources, to decide whether felony charges should be brought against a Sublette County man who allegedly tortured a wolf in February 2024.
A grand jury is a controversial legal tool rarely used in the state system.
Grant Smith, incoming director of the University of Wyoming (UW) College of Law Defender Aid Clinic, said it’s kind of like a pre-trial.
“Instead of deciding whether someone's innocent or guilty, the grand jury is deciding whether there's enough evidence to officially charge someone with a crime,” Smith said.
That someone is Cody Roberts.
Back in February 2024, Roberts allegedly ran down a wolf with a snowmobile and brought the live wolf into a local bar. Video footage later surfaced showing the live animal lying on the barroom floor, leashed and muzzled, with patrons chatting in the background. Another video shows Roberts trying to kiss the wolf.
This event spurred international outrage, with local politicians even saying it gave Wyoming a “black eye.”
At the time, Roberts paid a $250 fine imposed by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD), although the agency could’ve pursued higher charges, according to WyoFile reporting.
While the incident spurred state legislative action, many have called for further charges against Roberts. The county attorney’s case against him has remained active, but with little movement – until now.
Wyoming Public Media confirmed with multiple sources and reviewed documents showing that the decision on whether to press charges will be left in the hands of a grand jury. WyoFile reported in March that county attorney Clayton Melinkovich was considering felony animal cruelty charges. Melinkovich acknowledged the active case in an email to Wyoming Public Media several months ago, but declined to comment, confirm or deny the latest updates.
Melinkovich will make the case to the 12 Sublette County residents, and one alternate, selected to be on the grand jury.
‘The defendant is not there’
Within the legal community, some have qualms with the grand jury process. That’s mainly because the defense isn’t involved.
“It is absolutely 100% one-sided,” UW’s Smith said, who was formerly a federal public defender. “It's hearing one side of the story, and they [prosecutors] get to make it their best story, without anyone poking holes in it. None of it gets challenged. The defendant is not there.”
It’s also intended to be secret – only the jurors, prosecutor and potential witnesses are supposed to know.
“The defendant has no idea this is going on,” Smith said. “Without reporters bringing it to the light of day, the defendants normally have no idea that there's a grand jury being summoned for a potential crime.”
Smith added the intention is to protect those involved in the grand jury, especially in controversial cases.
Over the last year and a half, some of the folks with connections to the wolf incident have received death threats from angry people across the globe. This includes people directly involved, Sublette County businesses and even people who happen to share the same name as Roberts.
The secrecy is also supposed to protect the defendant. Typically, a county attorney uses a more commonly known, public process to press charges. The defendant receives county charges, which is called ‘information.’ At the arraignment, both the prosecutor and defense team present their cases and a judge determines if there’s enough evidence to continue the charges. The arraignment is typically public, unlike the grand jury.
“They [grand juries] were created to stop the overzealous prosecutor,” Smith said. “Charging someone with a crime has the potential to ruin their life – just the charge does.”
The history
The right to a grand jury is part of the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment. The history of the legal tool and how it’s evolved is something Shannon Heery, associate professor of law at Rhode Island’s Roger Williams University, is currently studying and writing on.
“The reason the Founders thought it [the grand jury] was important to be included was because, coming from England, there were a lot of abuses in terms of just charging people criminally with the whim of the Crown,” Heery said. “[It] was to have the citizens' involvement in deciding whether someone should be criminally charged.”
She added that initially, the grand jury would decipher what evidence existed by subpoenaing witnesses themselves. Based on that, they’d decide whether to charge someone.
“But over time, it became prosecutor led, which meant that now it's not just the individuals in the grand jury but it's also the prosecutor in the room,” Heery said. “This sort of understandable suspicion that arises related to the grand jury is, ‘What's happening behind closed doors?’ Is it a good thing for these things to be going on without fair cross examination of witnesses when they're called to testify?”
Within the legal community, there’s an old adage that a grand jury would “indict a ham sandwich.” It refers to the ease of indicting someone via a grand jury.
“But there's more to that quote, which was, ‘The grand jury would indict a ham sandwich – if that's what the prosecutor wanted,’” Heery said. “What's happening behind closed doors is generally led by the prosecutor, but to the world externally, they can say the grand jury decided this.”
Essentially, Heery said it can insulate an elected official from whatever decision is made on whether to pursue charges.
“It kind of allows the prosecutor to say, ‘Hey, the citizens made this choice, not me,’” she said.
Small town bias
But that decision being fair is made complicated in small towns, Heery said. In typical jury trials where charges have already been made, jury selection is an arduous process. Both the prosecutor and defense can get an individual thrown out for being biased, knowing too much about the case and myriad other reasons. But not in a grand jury.
“There isn't a jury selection process,” Heery said. “As long as you qualify on the basic level in most jurisdictions, which is, ‘Can you speak English? Can you understand what's happening?’ That's it, really. You sit for the grand jury.”
In Sublette County, population less than 10,000, it’s unlikely to find someone who’s unaware of the incident – let alone friends, family or acquaintances of those involved.
That county-wide bias could possibly be enough to spur a “change of venue” if the present case were a criminal trial where charges had already been made. But UW’s Grant Smith did some digging into Wyoming State Statute and found that’s not the case with grand juries.
“If you're a grand jury in another county, if the crime didn't happen there, you don't have the statutory authority to issue an indictment for that crime,” Smith said.
It’s expected the Sublette County grand jury will come to a decision by the end of August. It’ll take the consensus of nine of the 12 jurors for a decision.
If they say there’s not enough evidence, Smith said technically the county could still pursue charges.
“You're kind of rolling the dice that the judge is going to make a different determination than what the grand jury decided,” he said. “I think that would be tough unless you had some different evidence that you didn't know about at the time of the grand jury.”
If the jurors say there’s sufficient evidence, that will serve as the indictment of Cody Roberts.
Wyoming Public Media has reached out to the Roberts family on multiple occasions for comment.
