"Obviously, they didn't follow their own guidelines and they let the prosecutors specify their own design," said Don Hardenbergh, a Williamsburg-based courthouse design consultant who wrote a design guide for courts. "The grand jury area is not accessible by the public at all."
Benjamin said witnesses could feel pressured to testify in favor of the government, the same way a suspect might feel compelled to confess under questioning in a police station.
"The whole idea behind grand jury secrecy is to permit complete honesty, but you can make something so intimidating and so dominated by the government presence that you lose that neutrality," he said.
Edward A. Adams, spokesman for the Alexandria courthouse, said the layout meets federal guidelines in part because grand jurors enter the 10-story, red-brick building through the front door with the rest of the public. They then go up public staircases or an escalator to the gleaming marble columns of the second floor before they are met by security officers, who take them to the first floor using the special elevator key.
Prosecutors can ferry witnesses to the grand jury area -- or reach it themselves -- through a passageway from their office that goes directly there.
Experts on the court system said the level of secrecy in Alexandria is rare. In an informal survey, the Williamsburg-based National Center for State Courts found that state and local grand juries nationwide meet in secret but not in rooms sealed off from the public.
"I don't want to say that nobody has the same situation as Alexandria, but boy, none that I've heard of,'' said Lorri Montgomery, a spokeswoman for the group.
Dick Carelli, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, said most of the nation's older federal courthouses do not restrict access to grand jury areas.
For example, at the courthouse in the District, witnesses and prosecutors walk through a fully public hallway to get to the restricted grand jury area.
"It seems to have worked well for us here," said Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in the District. "If we are worried about someone's identity being disclosed, obviously there are ways around that. But usually, that's not an issue or problem.''
Many of the newer federal courthouses, however, do restrict access, Carelli said.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy run by the Federation of American Scientists, said he had never heard of such a cloistered grand jury area.
"The very layout of the building is designed to frustrate public access," Aftergood said. "They've gone beyond secrecy to a kind of meta-secrecy.''
