Chicago’s ABC News has posted online the full indictment of Ed Bachner, the financial consultant charged with murdering his wife with puffer-fish toxin. The indictment makes fascinating reading. My question is: Are indictments in the public record?

One of the aspects of the trial in which I was a juror that most surprised me was that the jury did not receive a copy of the indictment. Instead, the judge read it very rapidly before the opening statements. This particularly confused me, because it seemed to me that our job as jurors was to decide whether the state proved the charges in the indictment.

In the end, because of the way the judge handled the trial and then instructed us, I’ve concluded that the judge simply didn’t like the charges in the indictment. She rewrote them in our jury instructions. In fact, I looked up the statutes involved after the trial: the judge reworded the kidnapping statute in the written jury forms.

I know a judge has the right to dismiss inappropriate charges after the prosecution rests and to add “lesser and included charges.” I also know that a judge can overturn a guilty verdict at the end of a trial. But I don’t think a judge has the right to add charges to an indictment or to rewrite a state’s statutes.

It seems to me that if an indictment is public in advance of a trial, then the jury in the trial ought to be able to see it in writing.

But, as I’ve said many times: I am not a lawyer.