What I learned from Jury Duty part 2

Wednesday, 9 June 2021

I realised I didn’t actually mention anything I actually learnt in part 1 - so I’ve added some headings to this part of the story.

1. Don’t try to plan anything.

If you are on jury duty, but not actually on a case, you have to ring an answering machine after 5pm each day to find out if you are required the next day.  Yep an Answering Machine (there must be only about 5 left in the state!)- I don’t think I’ve intentionally rung one since the 90s when we used to ring one after frisbee games to advise the comp administrator of the score.   The supreme court answering machine rings and rings and rings before the message finally starts up.  

I’m flabbergasted that we can’t just be texted, particularly as the messages can be complex as they might only need part of the potential jurors (i.e surnames A-M), and some people like myself can’t turn up for the re-trial of the trial we’d been dismissed from. It’s not like they don’t have our details. 

Anyway - with cases starting, stopping and re-starting, going longer than expected, or finishing earlier, it’s impossible to plan anything around it. 

2. The courts are still in the 90s

In addition to the answering machine, the supreme court seems to have an aversion to technology altogether - one of the potential jurors tried a number of times to ring in sick one day (as we were strongly advised to do), but no-one answered any of the phone lines we were given.  So when his number was called up for a jury and he wasn’t there, the Sherriff’s office sent people to his house and to his work (apparently creeping around to a side window when no-one answered at the front - freaking out the other workers).  He says they could have just rung him.

On that, there was so much paper. Each jury member gets a physical copy of the evidence paperwork ,photos and maps.  In the first case that meant half a morning of piling up loose charge sheets and evidence lists and 30 printed photos (so they had to actually print 360 of these!), and walking in and out of court fearing dropping them all over the floor.

The second case the prosecution team were a million times more organised - we each got a binder at the start of the trial full of the evidence that was going to be presented - all nicely partitioned and labelled. We were under instruction not to look ahead as we wouldn’t have the context yet - so it was just like a home escape room game!  It must have taken someone ages to put these together - each of our binders included numerous sets of printed photos, maps, arial photos with  overlaid GPS tracks,  DNA testing results, GPS data (this alone was 5 pages of a3 sheets). 

Of course we could have easily looked at of this evidence on a tablet or similar device - and they could have drip fed the items to the tablet as they needed to.  Surely someone is working on this project (and surely that will lead to the loss of some full time jobs somewhere printing out police photographs!)

3. Actually we live in the 1800s

What are those wigs anyway? Are we still doing that?

4. It’s ok to judge people by appearances.

In the second trial I was on, the old people were allowed to stay (so we actually included a juror who was excused from the earlier case), but people who looked like they might have had a tougher life were sent away.  By the time we had a solid 12 I noticed that there were only 4 women to the 8 men, so when the judge asked if there was anyone who was going to have trouble making every day of the estimated 5 day case I raised my hand and said that I was starting a new job.  I was actually in two minds about doing this - I definitely wanted to make my life simpler (as Jon was also going to be away), but I was also worried I might be replaced by another male - which didn’t seem right particularly as the judge had told us some details of the case.   So I was actually glad when the judge said that it wasn’t a good enough excuse to avoid this case and I had to stay (I wonder if he noticed the gender imbalance too or maybe it’s just a common occurrence).  

5. It must be boring being an expert witness

During our case we had 3 expert witnesses come in.  The first was a surgeon who came to tell us more about the injuries the victim had sustained (I knew enough info from looking sideways my fingers at the photos as I couldn’t bear to look at them straight on). 

The second was a monitoring device tracking expert who came in to explain the maps she’d provided and tell us all about how they work, how accurate things are, what the data meant (and we generally had to get an explanation of every single column of any table we were presented with), and what the data meant for this particular case.  She was there for ages, and most of the time was just teaching us how to interpret the data we had. She must be in court a lot.

Then we had a DNA specialist.  First up we had a 12 slide powerpoint lecture including diagrams on what DNA is, which was hilariously delayed for half an hour when they realised that the text on the screen was too small for us to read so they had to print out 12 copies of the slides for each of us as well (there goes another tree and two canisters of black toner thanks to the black backgrounds!).  After our lecture we then got a thorough explanation of every single column in the testing results table, then we went through every item that was tested and what that meant in the context of the case.  It took so LONG!   And then of course there was cross examination which in the case of the experts generally meant the defence counsel asking them how long they had done their job for, what their training was, and clutching-at-straw type questions like whether the 400 billion to 1 (I’m not kidding - that was the number we were given) likelihood of the DNA matching a particular person was enough for the expert to say conclusively that it did, and how much less likely was the test which only came back with a 300 billion to one likelihood of it matching.   Sometimes the opposing counsel would ask questions that had already been answered or explained thoroughly - they probably had a reason but it came across to me like they weren’t listening which I found annoying and I just wanted to shout out "if you'd listened to the witness you'd KNOW"

Anyway - the experts must get asked the same questions ALL the time - and it must be hard to get actual work done if you are one of these guys. I really wanted the specialist surgeon to get back to hospital and do some real work as soon as possible!

 to be continued..