Every step of the proceedings at the organization of the Grand Jury was scrutinized. The question of the method of employing the stenographer to the Grand Jury was made subject of hours of argument. If she were irregularly employed, it was held, she was an unauthorized person in the Grand Jury room and her unwarranted presence sufficient to invalidate the indictments. Garret McEnerney, representing Eugene de Sabla, Jr., Frank Drum and John Martin, whose indictments grew out of the bribery of the Supervisors to fix the gas rate at 85 cents per 1000 cubic feet instead of 75 cents, was the first to raise this question. But attorneys for other defendants took it up and seriously considered it as valid objection to the sufficiency of the indictments. A further point was raised by several of the defendants that the stenographer had not been properly sworn. The question was seriously debated, whether she had looked at Prosecutor Heney or Foreman Oliver at the moment she was sworn to secrecy.[266] Another point was brought up by the defendants in the United Railroads bribery case, that inasmuch as the defendants Calhoun, Mullally and Ford, had been called to the Grand Jury room and compelled to fall back upon their constitutional rights to avoid testifying, that they had been placed in a prejudicial position before the Grand Jury, which constituted reversible error.[267] Another objection was that the Grand Jury box had been destroyed in the great fire of 1906, and that no order had come from any department of the Superior Court ordering its restoration. Again, it was asserted, that Grand Juror James E. Gordan was a member of the Grand Jury panel of 1906, while the other Grand Jurors were chosen from the 1907 list. Indictments brought by a Grand Jury thus constituted were claimed to be without effect. Had any one of these and many other similar objections been sustained, all indictments against the graft defendants would have been invalidated. Every objection had to be met. Days and weeks were spent by the District Attorney's office in meeting, or preparing to meet objections which to the layman appear trifling and ridiculous. In the midst of this technical fight to have the indictments against them set aside, the graft defendants received aid from an unlooked-for source. Sympathizers with the United Railroads conductors and motormen, then on strike, whose union Patrick Calhoun was at the time endeavoring to crush--and finally did crush--started an independent attack upon the Grand Jury.