A pure 'I don't know the law especially in Florida' guess - if she goes to a grand jury then grand jury secrecy rules become an issue; if she just announces a no-charge she can also deliver a prosecutor's report.

But let's also remember that there have been instances in the past -- particularly in certain unnamed parts of the country, whenever racial components have been introduced into the discussion -- where grand juries have been pointedly predisposed toward a refusal to act, despite clear and unambiguous evidence presented to them that an indictment is clearly warranted.

In those instances, for whatever the rationale, grand jurors were allowed to grant themselves considerable leeway to extra-legally adjudicate the guilt or innocence of the suspect(s), rather than simply determine if enough evidence exists to warrant the case going to trial, as is the primary purpose of a grand jury.

I'll offer up one example with which I'm very familiar, the notorious "Massie Affair" here in Honolulu, which rocked the country back in 1931-32. In this instance, an all-white male grand jury (back in the day, women were generally prohibited from jury duty in the United States) initially refused to indict Bell Telephone heiress Grace Bell Fortescue, her son-in-law Navy Lt. Thomas Massie and two Navy enlisted men, Edward Lord and Deacon Jones, for the kidnapping and subsequent shooting death of Joseph Kahahawai, a 21-year-old Hawaiian who had been earlier accused -- quite falsely, as it was subsequently shown -- of the rape and assault of Lt. Massie's 20-year-old wife, Thalia.

Three separate times, Judge Albert Christy refused to accept the grand jury's report of no indictment, and three times he had to remind the jurors that three of the suspects had been apprehended red-handed while trying to dispose of Kahahawai's body in the Pacific Ocean just off then-rural east Oahu, while the fourth had further admitted -- and even bragged about -- killing him to the Honolulu police.

Christy also correctly surmised after interviewing individual jurors that they were wrongly considering the race and social status of both the accused and the deceased, in making their determination that Mrs. Fortescue, Lt. Massie and their two cohorts were simply upholding the unspoken "white man's code of honor" -- to use the former grand jury foreman's words -- in killing young Kahahawai.

After the third refusal, when Judge Christy learned that the aforementioned grand jury foreman -- who was an executive with the local firm Dillingham Corp., which held lucrative contracts with the U.S. Navy -- was under outside instructions from his boss to prevent an indictment, he removed him from that post, appointed another and then sent the jurors back for further deliberations. Whereupon, they voted 12 to 8 to indict Mrs. Fortescue, Lt. Massie and Seamen Lord and Jones, on the felony charge of second-degree murder.

Anyway, that sort of predisposition, while probably rare, is one of the potential pitfalls of the grand jury process, especially in those cases that have taken upon a controversial and / or political element, which might cause grand jurors to make an emotional decision (or in the Massie case, a selfish business decision), rather than conduct a dispassionate determination of the facts of the case as presented to them.