Definition
"Indicted for or charged with any" is a statutory phrase used in criminal and quasi-criminal legislation to describe the class of persons to whom a provision applies — specifically, those who are either formally indicted by a grand jury or otherwise officially charged with a criminal offense. The phrase operates as a scope-of-application clause: it marks the threshold at which a person enters the category of accused persons for purposes of the statute in question.
The phrase is composite and disjunctive. "Indicted for" refers to the formal grand jury process by which a bill of indictment is found and returned, triggering prosecution on a serious offense. "Charged with any" is broader and encompasses accusations initiated by other lawful methods — information, complaint, or other formal accusation — that do not require grand jury action. The conjunction "or" signals that either pathway suffices to bring a person within the statute's reach.
The trailing word "any" is a quantifier of breadth, modifying the category of offense that follows. Courts have construed "any" in this context expansively, resisting efforts to limit the phrase to particular grades or classes of offense unless the surrounding statutory language compels a narrower reading.
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Common Confusion
The phrase can appear deceptively redundant — as though "indicted for" and "charged with" describe the same thing. They do not. An indictment is one specific species of charge, issued by a grand jury. A charge can arise without indictment, through a magistrate's finding of probable cause, a prosecutor's information, or a formal complaint. Statutory draftsmen included both terms precisely to close the gap and ensure that persons accused by either route fell within the provision. Researchers reading historical statutes should not assume "charged with" absorbs "indicted for" or vice versa — each carries distinct procedural significance.
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Why It Matters in Research
**Statutory scope traps.** This phrase does heavy lifting in criminal statutes governing bail, bail forfeiture, disqualification from office, civil disability, and competency to testify. Whether a person is "indicted for or charged with any" offense is often the trigger for the statute's operation. Researchers should identify precisely which procedural posture the statute requires before concluding a provision applies.
**Grand jury vs. information jurisdictions.** The phrase gained particular traction in English and American jurisdictions where both indictment and information were recognized modes of prosecution. In jurisdictions that abolished or sharply curtailed the grand jury, "indicted for" became a near-anachronism in statutory text, and "charged with" carried most of the operative weight. Historical statutes drafted in dual-procedure jurisdictions should not be read as though the phrase maps cleanly onto a single-procedure system.
**The word "any" and its construction.** Courts have occasionally been asked whether "any offence" means every offense without exception or whether context implies a limitation to offenses of a certain grade. The leading English case cited in Rapalje & Lawrence — 7 Q.B.D. 24 — addressed precisely this construction problem. Researchers working with Victorian-era English statutes or American statutes modeled on them should trace whether "any" was given its natural broad meaning or was judicially confined.
**Temporal sensitivity.** The phrase describes a status — being under accusation — not a conviction. Statutes using this phrase apply at the accusation stage, before guilt is established. Researchers should not conflate such provisions with post-conviction disability statutes, which use different triggering language (e.g., "convicted of," "sentenced for").
**Connection to competency and disqualification provisions.** Historically, being indicted for or charged with certain offenses rendered a person incompetent as a witness or disqualified from holding office under specific statutes. These rules have been substantially reformed or abolished in most jurisdictions, but the phrase appears throughout older statutes in this disqualification context. Reading those provisions without recognizing their procedural trigger — accusation, not conviction — distorts their historical effect.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not provide a freestanding entry for the full phrase "indicted for or charged with any." The relevant entry appears under OFFENCE (in a statute), with the sole citation being 7 Q.B.D. 24, 28 — an English Queen's Bench Division case from approximately 1881. The entry is skeletal, functioning as a pointer rather than an exposition. This is typical of the dictionary's treatment of statutory phrases: it flags that the phrase carries a defined meaning in a specific judicial context but leaves the researcher to consult the case directly.
What the Rapalje & Lawrence entry signals, but does not elaborate, is that the meaning of "offence" as used in a statute — and therefore the meaning of "any offence" in a phrase like this one — is a matter of statutory construction, not inherent definition. Courts are not bound by general criminal law definitions of "offence" when construing a particular statute's scope; they look to context, purpose, and surrounding text. This is the core analytical move that historical sources often understate.
The limitation of the historical dictionary record here is significant. No extended treatment of the disjunctive structure ("indicted for or charged with") appears to exist in the standard historical legal dictionaries. Researchers should not assume that the absence of a fuller entry means the phrase was uncontroversial — it likely means the interpretive work was done through case law rather than doctrinal synthesis.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: INDICTMENT; CHARGE (Criminal); GRAND JURY; COMPETENCY OF WITNESSES (historical)
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