Adventures in Jury Duty

I reported for jury duty on Wednesday, March 4 expecting to serve for 2 days and be excused. But I was selected to sit on a jury right away! The estimate for length of trial was that we could be there through the 24th of March. Thankfully, they overestimated.

The hardest thing was rescheduling all my responsibilities for the three-week period. But aside from that, it was really a good experience. I think serving on a jury is always interesting. You get to see how the process of justice works, and you always learn a lot. And you get to meet some great people.

In the case of my jury, there were 14 of us selected. We were told that after we saw the whole trial and before deliberations began they would select two of us to be alternates. The alternates would leave and the other 12 people would deliberate and decide on the verdict. If one of the 12 got sick or became unable to serve, then an alternate would be called back and deliberations would begin again.

Interestingly, out of the 14 of us, only one was male. We spent all our breaks together during the trial, so you can just image a room full of women with lots of talk about knitting and pets and care-giving, etc. Every one of us (including the male who was a great sport about being the only man) got along great. By the third day of trial people were teasing that wouldn’t it be fun to have a potluck or bring in platters of goodies and food to the jury room? And maybe they could share some with the judge! Pretty funny.

In fact we were having SO much fun we had to ask the bailiff how much they could hear in the courtroom what was going on in the jury room. The jury room is just on the other side of the wall from the back of the courtroom, you see. Was our loud boisterous laughter disturbing anything? The bailiff (also a woman) told us that she only heard us because she was standing right in front of our door. And if we could be heard with the door closed it only meant the others in the courtroom would be jealous. It seemed like every time the bailiff opened our door to ask us to line up and return to the court room there was a roll of laughter that escaped the door before we could quiet ourselves. I remember the bailiff telling us “okay, you are having entirely too much fun in here, it’s time to go back to work!” She was smiling when she said that.

The case itself was interesting overall. Like with any trial though there were some hours of testimony that were verrry dry and we were glad for our breaks. As I mentioned above, the length of trial length was overestimated. At the end of the day on Tuesday the 10th both sides had finished presenting witnesses. We came back on Wednesday morning and were given jury instructions and then heard closing arguments. Then the clerk pulled two names out of an envelope to see who would be the alternate jurors. And I was chosen to be the second alternate! So they sent me home. The other alternate juror was the male juror. I traded email addresses with a couple people before leaving so I could find out how everything came out.

After over a week of being told I could not talk about this case until deliberations, I was now excluded from deliberations and still could not talk about it. I was “on hold” until the conclusion of deliberations because they might need me back. Late Thursday the bailiff called me to tell me the verdict and that I was now free to talk about the case.

Overall it was a good experience. I was a little saddened to be sent home “just when it was getting good” but I trusted my fellow jurors to render a fair verdict, and they did. I will write a separate entry to tell about the case.