Thirteen Things I Learned On Jury Duty
(This was originally published on Big List Energy at Medium.com)
I recently served on a jury for a murder trial. Though I learned a lot of stuff during the trial about DNA evidence, tracing cell phones, and determining time of death (don’t believe anything a TV medical examiner says about time of death. Nothing. They’re just wrong), this isn’t about any of that.
This is what I learned about being on a jury.
(Okay, fine, if you want to know about the trial I was on, check out GUILTY! My Time On Jury Duty here on The Recliner. Believe me, this article is at least a little bit funnier. And a lot shorter.)
1. Courthouse security is serious
They’ll let you bring almost anything into the courthouse, as long as you show it to them. Take your laptop out of your bag. Take your watch off your wrist. Take off your belt (the courthouse is not a good place for pants that haven’t shrunk a little).They’ll even X-ray your coffee.Yes, they do get friendlier if they see you often enough. No, they will still make you take off your belt.
2. Keep Quiet
Not in the jury room; in fact, it may have been too quiet there. But outside,the first rule of jury duty is don’t talk about jury duty. Not until it’s all over. Nothing about the case, who it involves, etc. Keep your friends and relations guessing. Don’t even drop obscure references to what’s going on, because they’ll get all judgy and want to go to the judge and accuse you of talking about the trial, and that will make the judge all judgy. The judge is supposed to be judgy about other people, not about you.
3. Take notes
I took a lot of notes. Not only to keep the complicated facts of the case straight, but because if I hadn’t, I might have fallen asleep. One of my fellow jurors drew some incredible sketches in her notebook to stay awake; I’m not talented that way, so I just wrote 140 loose-leaf pages of notes.Very few of which I read afterward.
4. All those notes are easier to write with a fountain pen
My handwriting is awful, but if I have to grip a skinny ballpoint pen, it’s worse. I always liked fountain pens, and I discovered Daiso, right across the street from the courthouse, has nice plump fountain pens for $2.25 each, and I went through one during the trial. I couldn’t refill it, but it saved my hand.
5. Be nice
There were 15 people on my jury. Three of them were destined to become alternates, not part of the final deliberations unless someone else had to drop out. You spend a lot of time in a small room with those people, waiting for the court to be ready for you, doomscrolling while everyone else gets their morning and afternoon breaks, and when the parents need a private conversation…I mean, when the judge and attorneys need to talk without the jury present. And, of course, during deliberations. That jury room is small, and it’s better to get along with everyone than not.
6. Don’t be infectious
As I said, the jury room is small. It’s also, like a kindergarten classroom, a Petri dish. All the people on the far end of the room got sick the first Thursday night. They were all in better shape when court reconvened the next week, except for one guy who came in wearing a mask, coughing. You know how it is, especially after COVID, when you cough everyone looks at you like you’re intentionally spreading the plague. It’s not like we wanted to look dagger-eyed at the poor.
Mid-morning the judge sent us home, except for the coughing guy, who was ordered to visit urgent care. Of course, this meant the trial would take about a day longer, unless we could convince the prosecutor to speed things up by not asking every expert witness to testify about the details of the training that led to them being experts. Honestly, we discussed telling the judge “Your honor, the jury would like to stipulate that the witness knows what the hell she’s talking about.”
The sick guy came back the next day, saying the urgent care doctor couldn’t figure out why he was there; all he had was a cold, nothing they could do for him. The guy told the doctor “The judge told me to come,” so the doctor wrote him a note and sent him home for the rest of the day. The next day he came in and coughed some more, but we all very pointedly did not stare at him.
7. But if you do get sick, everybody gets time off
The next week, one of the jurors caught COVID. Monday morning, we were all there but one. So we waited. And waited. Then they passed out masks to us. We looked at each other and nodded, certain this was no problem at all. Finally, the bailiff told us the absent person tested positive for COVID on Saturday, and gave us the rest of the week off.
8. The bailiff is your friend, or maybe your mom
Speaking of the bailiff, in my court at least (other jurisdictions may vary), almost all your day-to-day contact with the system is through the bailiff. In my case, she was a court employee, not a law enforcement officer. She was our jury mom: she handled all the communication, gathered the jury together, took roll, escorted us in and out of the jury room, and, most importantly, made sure the candy dish and coffee pot were full.
9. Some juries turn into social clubs, some don’t
My jury was pretty quiet. We told a few jokes, but even though our candy potluck was a great success, we never really introduced ourselves until we started deliberating. This was quite different from the other jury trial in progress at the same time. They got together in the jury assembly room each morning joking, catching up on what they’d been doing, and gabbing in general. We just sat there, scattered all over the room, looking at our phones until they sent us to our (jury) room.
10. Social club or not, potlucks are inevitable
Given enough time, any group of people will organize a potluck. Ours was a candy potluck, apparently because the dish of candy our bailiff refilled every morning was inadequate. Besides, almost everyone likes candy, and a $10per diemdoesn’t pay for lunch.(Sweets eaten in a jury room don’t have any calories, right?)
11. No one talks to the jury
When the judge warns everyone not to talk to the jury during the trial, everyone takes the order seriously. The attorneys won’t even ride the elevator with jurors. Twice the defense team found themselves on the same elevator as a few jurors. Those poor attorneys got off so quickly you’d think we smelled weird.
12. Being elected presiding juror doesn’t make you boss of anything
I got chosen to be presiding juror because I’d been on a jury before. My jobs included trying to keep the jurors on topic. I also got to sit at the head of the table so everyone could see me, and I got put in charge of the laptop when people wanted to see electronic evidence.Fortunately, I still remember how to run Windows. (Thirty years of muscle memory will do that.)
In the end, I got to write “guilty” on the verdict forms and sign my name to them. That made my hand cramp worse than taking 140 pages of notes.
13. The losing side doesn’t really like you anymore
In our county, the prosecutor and defense attorneys really like talking to the jurors after the verdict is in. They like to know what we thought of the job they did and what testimony or evidence worked better or worse. (Oddly, no one cared if we thought the endless questions to the expert witnesses about their training made any difference.) I tried to tell the lead defense attorney she did a great job even though she lost, but she didn’t seem very eager to talk to me. You’d think I smelled weird.
