Definition
An inditee is a person who has been indicted — that is, formally accused of a crime by a grand jury through the issuance of an indictment. The term is an archaic Law French form of what modern legal usage renders as "indictee" or, more commonly, "defendant" or "accused."
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in older English legal materials, particularly texts predating the consolidation of modern criminal procedure vocabulary. It does not appear in contemporary American or English practice; any modern source using "inditee" is either quoting or paraphrasing historical material.
The spelling itself is a navigational signal. The "inditee" form (without the "c") reflects the Law French orthographic tradition that persisted in English legal writing well into the eighteenth century. Researchers searching digitized historical corpora should run both "inditee" and "indictee" as search strings, as transcription practices and period conventions vary. The same individual may be referred to as the inditee in procedural passages and as the defendant or prisoner elsewhere in the same document.
The term connects directly to the broader vocabulary of grand jury practice. Understanding what an inditee was requires familiarity with how indictments were found, the role of the grand jury in preferring bills, and the distinction between a presentment and a true bill — concepts that governed the moment at which a person became an inditee in the first place.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: inditee means a person indicted, and all three flag it as a Law French term belonging to old English law. Each cites the same two sources — the Mirror of Justices (Mirr. c. 1, § 3) and the preface to the ninth part of Coke's Reports (9 Co. pref.) — reflecting how narrow the documentary basis for this term actually is. The historical dictionaries offer no further elaboration, no discussion of usage variation, and no indication that the term carried any meaning beyond its literal function as a label for the indicted person.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural context: the moment of becoming an inditee, the rights attaching at that moment, or how the term related to contemporaneous alternatives such as "the party indicted," "the accused," or "the prisoner at the bar." Researchers should not read substantive legal significance into the choice of this term over those alternatives in historical sources — it is largely a stylistic and linguistic artifact of Law French influence on English legal writing.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs exclusively to the English legal tradition and its early American inheritance. It does not appear as an operative term in any modern jurisdiction. American courts and statutes use "defendant" or "accused" in criminal proceedings, and "indictee" (if used at all) appears only in passing scholarly or historical reference.