On the Jury! (Part 1)

To hear most people talk about it, you'd think jury duty was a) something to dread, b) something to get out of, and c) something to...just endure, mostly. And I can see how that works - in fact, if things had gone much differently yesterday I might be in total agreement.

But you know what? Actually serving on a jury changes everything. A few aspects of the experience I found to be extremely unique. It's both surprisingly like and unlike what you might expect from the ubiquitous pop culture jury/trial representations. But first, here's how it went down:

Showed up at 8:30 AM (told to be there at 8). Filled out a short survey, watched instructional video (stressed the pride you should feel in being a juror). One judge walked into the room, said all her cases were resolved for the day, and thanked us pretty comprehensively. At about 10, 14 of us, including me, were selected from the 30 or so in the room. About 175 had been summoned that day.

So we were walked down to one of the courtrooms and filed into the jury box. The two lawyers (both women) and the defendant (a girl who was probably 19-20) were present, as was the judge. The judge gave us some instructions, and then we were briefly surveyed by each lawyer. I spoke up once or twice, trying to say something decently intelligent without revealing any kind of bias. At this point I'm thinking "what the heck, I want to do this". After some more waiting, getting sent out of the room and called back in, 6 of us, including me, were instructed to stay.

So, after lunch - about 1:15 - the trial actually starts. Girl is accused of stealing an $80 bracelet from department store. Everyone agrees that she picked it up. She says she put it down somewhere in the store. Prosecution says after not cooperating with the "loss prevention officer" in the parking lot after leaving the store, she somehow slipped it to her sister (who subsequently drove away). But the thing is, the bracelet was never found. Not in defendant's purse, not in the store, not in the car.

So it ended up being a sort of he said she said thing. This was not helped by the prosecuting lawyer, who called in the loss prevention guy to describe what he saw on the security video and THEN showed us the video (choppy and not in the least conclusive), instead of simply having the guy explain what was going on as the video rolled. The other lawyer was a younger woman who called out "objection" at every opportunity - much to the chagrin of the judge, who would roll his eyes before grumbling "sustain" or "overrule" as if he really, really didn't care.

Oh yeah - the judge. This guy was in appearance and mannerisms a classic grumpy old man, but he treated the jury quite civilly and had a dry, rather acidic sense of humor. He took no effort to disguise his annoyance (at least as I reasoned) at the monumental waste of resources on such a trivial matter (more on that later) and a couple times he cracked seriously wise on the lawyers.
Example:
Prosecution lawyer: "The state would like to request that-"
Judge: "Well then go ahead and just REQUEST it - I don't care what the state WOULD want to do."
PL (in stride, to her credit): "The state requests that exhibit A be brought in"
J: "Now or later?"
PL: "Now."
J: "Okay, go ahead"
(Pause, laywer turns to someone in audience)
PL: "The state requests 5 minutes to set up the DVD player..."
J:"Well that would be 'later,' then, wouldn't it?"

You had to cringe a bit for the lawyers, but you know what? Not a single person in that courtroom suffered for lack of entertainment.

Anyway, it was almost 5PM by the time both sides wrapped up. Prosecution called 2 witnesses and showed the tape, defense called 1 witness (the defendant), and after a few final instructions we were sent to go figure things out. Out of the 6 of us, 4 initially leaned "not guilty" and 2 "guilty". But it only took about 30 minutes to reach an agreement - even after going back and looking frame-by-frame at the tape there was simply not enough evidence to conclude anything other than "not guilty"

And that is what we did. I think it was the right call. The state's case wasn't very good. If she REALLY managed to steal the stupid thing and get away with it...she deserved it.

This is now long, so I will make it a part 1.