Rule 36.14.Filing of No Bills

A no bill is a grand jury’s decision not to indict — the panel reviewed the evidence and declined to bring charges. Rule 36.14 tells the clerk how to handle these once the grand jury issues them. The clerk keeps a running list of every no bill returned, and a copy of that list gets recorded in the Minutes and Final Records described in Rule 36.6.

The no bills themselves are filed chronologically, in the order they came in. That ordering makes it possible to find a particular no bill later by working from the date it was returned, without needing to search by case number or defendant name first.

This rule ties the criminal filing process in Rule 36.13 to the record-keeping system in Rule 36.6: an indictment or accusation moves forward as an active criminal file, while a no bill gets logged on its own list and preserved chronologically as part of the permanent record.