Definition
The person who causes another to be indicted — that is, the party who sets the grand jury process in motion against a named accused. The person so indicted is sometimes called the indictee. In practice, the indictor is typically the complaining witness or prosecutor whose accusation or testimony before the grand jury initiates formal criminal proceedings by indictment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone who indicts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who indicts.
The common and legal definitions are unusually close here, but the legal term carries a specific procedural implication the ordinary usage lacks: the indictor's role is defined in relation to the grand jury mechanism. Saying someone "indicts" another in common speech often means simply accusing them; in law, the indictor is the party whose complaint or testimony triggers a formal grand jury finding, a distinction that matters when tracing standing and the origins of a prosecution in historical records.
Why It Matters in Research
INDICTOR is a procedural actor term, not a substantive legal concept, and researchers encounter it almost exclusively in older criminal procedure materials and historical case reports. Several research traps apply.
First, the term appears infrequently in modern sources. Contemporary criminal procedure has largely absorbed the concept into the roles of "complaining witness," "complainant," or the prosecutor's office itself. If you are searching a Law Mind corpus spanning multiple centuries, expect INDICTOR to appear with meaningful frequency only in materials predating the mid-twentieth century.
Second, the pairing INDICTOR / INDICTEE follows a structural pattern common in older legal vocabulary — the actor and the acted-upon defined together. Researchers searching for one should consider searching for the other, as sources often define them in tandem or use one to gloss the other.
Third, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry is incomplete as preserved — it reads "He who indicts another for —" without resolution. This truncation is a known hazard with Rapalje & Lawrence entries in digitized collections. Do not treat the entry as dispositive; cross-reference against Bouvier's or Black's for the full definition.
Fourth, distinguish the indictor from the grand jury itself. The grand jury finds the indictment; the indictor is the individual whose accusation precipitates the proceeding. In historical records, particularly in English common law practice, private individuals could act as indictors, initiating prosecutions without state involvement in the modern sense. This private prosecution context is largely absent from American practice but may appear in materials drawing on English precedent.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition with near-identical language: the indictor is the person who causes another to be indicted, and the person so indicted is the indictee. The uniformity across Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence signals that this was a settled, uncontested term with no meaningful doctrinal dispute about its meaning.
Black's 1st and 2nd editions both carry the definition cleanly, though both editions in the digitized corpus append unrelated text immediately after the INDICTOR entry — material relating to indorsement and indigena respectively. This is an artifact of the source digitization, not an editorial interpolation by Black. Researchers using digitized historical dictionaries should be alert to this kind of textual bleed between adjacent entries.
Bouvier's treatment is characteristically concise and matches Black's almost verbatim, suggesting a shared common-law source rather than independent analysis. Neither Bouvier's nor Black's explores the English practice of private prosecution that gives the term its fullest historical context — a gap researchers working on pre-nineteenth century criminal procedure should fill from treatise sources outside the dictionary shelf.