On April 5, 16-year-old Iremamber Sykap was shot and killed by Honolulu police. HPD has maintained that the shooting was justified, but on May 19 a police officer leaked a video which shows that the stolen car Skyap was driving was stopped at the time of the shooting, and that the officers who shot him were not in front of the car when the shots were fired — they were beside and behind it. Medical records show that Sykap was killed by a shot to the back of the head and that there were three more bullet holes in the back of his shoulders.

This is a troubling (and incomplete) set of facts. By law, police use of deadly force is permitted only when law enforcement officers reasonably believe the subject poses a significant threat of serious bodily injury or death to themselves or others. Moreover, HPD’s recently revised use of force policy narrowly circumscribes the situations in which police are permitted to shoot at a subject in a vehicle or at the vehicle itself.

On June 9, Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm’s office announced that it had presented evidence to an Oahu grand jury seeking indictments of three officers relating to Sykap’s shooting, but that the grand jury had “declined to return indictments for any of the officers.” The prosecutors’ press release, which was three sentences long, also said, “The Department is reviewing the matter.”

This was a surprising revelation — and it is woefully incomplete. It was surprising because grand juries indict in nearly all cases in which a prosecutor asks them to do so. The prosecutor is the only legal professional present at a grand jury hearing; there is no judge and there is no defense lawyer. There is, therefore, no meaningful check on the prosecutor’s power. As one leading authority on grand juries has concluded, the prosecutor “has complete control over the grand jury process.”

And here lies the puzzle: If grand juries are so easily controlled and so likely to indict, what happened in Sykap’s case? There are at least three possibilities.

First, in incidents involving police use of force, prosecutors sometimes present purposely weak cases to the grand jury, because they do not really want to indict. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. In all of these cases (and more), a grand jury provided prosecutors with political cover and a means of avoiding accountability for non-charge outcomes that prosecutors had desired in the first place.

We do not know if “the fix was in” in Sykap’s grand jury proceeding, but with the abject failure of local law enforcement to disclose information about this case — police videos, call records, autopsy reports and so on — it remains a plausible possibility.

The second possibility is that Honolulu prosecutors presented a case to the grand jury that was rushed, slapdash and sloppy. On this hypothesis, prosecutors tried to obtain an indictment but blew it. If this is what happened, then prosecutors must be disappointed by the outcome, and they might try again to get charges filed.

The third possibility is that prosecutors wanted to indict the HPD officers and presented a solid case to the grand jury, but the grand jury exercised its own independent judgment and decided not to indict. Given what is known about how grand juries usually work, and on the presently available information about Sykap’s case, this appears to be the least likely possibility.

Criminal cases involving the police are the ultimate test of a prosecutor’s independence and integrity. Such cases also offer an opportunity to earn the community’s trust — or to lose it. If prosecutors continue to withhold information about the killing of Iremamber Sykap and the investigations that followed, the judiciary should order disclosure of relevant facts, as courts have done in other jurisdictions. Nothing so diminishes justice as secrecy.