Yes, I heard complaints about the time spent waiting and milling around waiting for something to happen yesterday. It is an imperfect system.
I have not yet had the pleasure of serving on a jury. (Watch my jury duty notice arrive in the mail tomorrow.) I think it would be really interesting.
With regard to juror script-writing...the lad’s friend who drove over with him, was seated on a jury for a hit and run trial. It was a quick trial and they finished up by the end of the day. In this case, there was unanimous agreement that the defendant was as guilty as sin, but the state failed to provide enough evidence for a clear conviction. So they regretfully voted Not Guilty. Not exactly script-writing, though the temptation was there. As far as the jury was concerned, justice was not served and they were angry about it. Adding insult to injury, when they filed out of the room, the defendant winked at them repeatedly and thanked them for their hard work. In such a way that several of them apparently wanted to punch him in the face. Makes you wonder.
Posted by Kate on 01/08/08 at 03:14 PM
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The only time I served on a jury it was a pretty clearcut robbery. Night manager of a Jack-in-the-Box stole the night’s take (the video over the bank night deposit vault showed he’d never dropped the bag into it). Pretty mundane, and since I was unemployed at the time I’d have been up for a five-week gaudy murder case, although that one sounds more gory than gaudy.
The thing they don’t tell you about jury duty is all the time you spend waiting around, between the lawyers conferring, the continuances, and in my case, the two full days arguing with one holdout on the jury who kept coming up with theories about how the guy might not have been the thief. We finally persuaded him that the evidence was all we could go on, not the scripts he kept writing.