...random from the master jury list,” the clerk relied on her own personal knowledge about the prospective petit jurors in selecting two of them to be summoned for a grand jury that had an insufficient number of jurors, thereby violating the “random[ness]” requirement of OCGA § 15-12-66.1....

...e and held that relief was warranted. State v. Towns, 307 Ga. 351, 355 (834 SE2d 839) (2019) (emphasis in original) (affirming dismissal of the indictment where two grand jurors were chosen in violation of the randomness requirement in OCGA § 15-12-66.1)....

...Unsure whether the efforts of the sheriff would prove successful, the presiding judge also directed the clerk to supplement the number of prospective grand jurors with persons who had been summoned to appear for service as petit jurors, a procedure that is authorized by OCGA § 15-12-66.1. State, however, has no standing to complain on appeal about a ruling that in no way aggrieved the State....

...selected to serve on the grand jury. The Clerk of Court chose [T. S.] and [B. W.] purposefully and not at random . ... Based on these findings, the trial court granted the motion to dismiss the indictment, and the State appeals. 2. As we noted earlier, OCGA § 15-12-66.1 authorizes a court to select persons who have been summoned for service as petit jurors to supplement the number of persons summoned to appear for 5 service on the grand jury when necessary to secure the attendance of enough jurors to empanel a grand jury. Section 15-12-66.1 requires, however, that the petit jurors selected to serve on the grand jury be chosen randomly: When from challenge or from any other cause there are not a sufficient number of persons in attendance to complete the empaneling of grand jurors, the presiding judge shall order the clerk to choose at random from the names of persons summoned as trial jurors a sufficient number of prospective grand jurors necessary to complete the grand jury. . . . OCGA § 15-12-66.1 (emphasis added)....

...ry winners, “random” means “governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population” (punctuation and footnote omitted)).5 Even if “random” is used only in a more colloquial sense in OCGA § 15-12-66.1 — that is, even if the statute does not demand a selection process in which each petit juror has a perfectly equal chance of being chosen to serve on the grand jury, cf....

...supplement the number of persons summoned for service as grand jurors, 8 trial court was right to conclude that T. S. and B. W. were not “cho[sen] at random” for service on the grand jury and were not, therefore, selected as required by OCGA § 15-12-66.1.7 3....

...respect to an irregular grand jury, the remedy for such a violation is the dismissal of an indictment returned by the grand jury. See Harper v. State, 283 Ga. 102, 103 (1) (657 SE2d 213) (2008). Although the State does not dispute that the randomness requirement of OCGA § 15-12-66.1 is an “essential and substantial” provision,8 the dissent does, and so, we will consider whether the randomness requirement is “essential and substantial.” To begin, we note that the dissent fails to articulate a meaningful s...

...and substantial” standard in this case. 13 are the “twin pillars” of our modern statutory scheme for the selection of jurors, but it discounts the significance of the “at random” requirement of OCGA § 15-12-66.1....

...The essential gist of the modern scheme is that jury representativeness and impartiality are best guaranteed by inclusivity in the identification of the universe of persons eligible to serve and by randomness in selecting arrays from that universe. It is true that OCGA § 15-12-66.1 does not concern the selection of grand jurors in the ordinary course; it applies only when the usual selection process has failed to produce the appearance of a sufficient number of prospective jurors to empanel a grand jury....

...at 636 (violation of law concerning selection of additional jurors when an insufficient number of summoned jurors have appeared warranted relief). Moreover, we note that the General Assembly in 2014 specifically amended the jury selection statutes to add the “at random” requirement to OCGA § 15-12-66.1, see Ga. L. 2014, p. 862, § 13 14 (amending OCGA § 15-12-66.1 to add “at random”), three years after its adoption of most of the other provisions of our modern scheme for selecting juries....

...is a drastic remedy. Maybe so, but it also is evidence that the General Assembly knows exactly how to deem a violation irremediable by a motion to quash. The General Assembly made no such provision with respect to the randomness requirement of OCGA § 15-12-66.1. 15 its members were randomly selected....

...is not a central component of the overall statutory scheme for securing fairly representative and non-discriminatory grand juries. To the contrary, it is a minor adjunct to the statutory scheme to be used only on an as-needed basis. Thus, while it is true that OCGA § 15-12-66.1 requires the clerk when pulling supplemental grand jurors to do so “at random” from the randomly generated list of those already summoned as trial jurors, in my view, this added layer of randomness is not such an “essential an...

...identity of the persons selected for the array from the universe of persons eligible to serve.” (Maj. op. at 355.) Such a standard is too broad, given that one of the basic purposes of the jury selection 13 Although the General Assembly amended OCGA § 15-12-66.1 to add the “at random” requirement three years after its adoption of most of the other provisions of our modern scheme for selecting juries, I am loath to speculate as to the significance of that particular phrase when the General Assembly made so many other substantial changes to this Code provision....