The only time I was called for jury duty I was chosen to be on the jury. I was pretty excited, actually, as the judge said the case would only take a couple of days and I thought it would be a good experience. Overall, I still think it was a good experience, but I was very surprised at how illogical and random many of the jurors were. It also made me never ever want to go to trial, no matter how iron clad the evidence supporting my innocence was.
It was a domestic abuse case. The defendant was a middle-aged man, charged with two misdemeanor counts due to him pushing a glass against his wife’s throat and leaving a mark (battery and something else), and one misdemeanor count of resisting arrest when he balked in a doorway as officers were trying to lead him outside to talk (at which point they tackled him to the ground). There was a 911 tape when the wife locked herself in the bathroom and left the phone on, where we hear him screaming at her, kicking the door down, and then what sounded like him slapping her before leaving to go throw their couch out into the yard.
Either the slap or the glass-pushing were grounds for guilty verdicts on the first two counts, but we ended up deliberating for almost two days. I thought his defense was highly unbelievable – he alleged that she came home, drank an entire bottle of champagne by herself, and then tripped and fell face first onto the carpet, giving her throat a rug burn. However, one juror kept focusing on the fact that the two parties gave contradicting testimony on completely unrelated facts, i.e. who knocked all the CDs off the coffee table and when. She also didn’t seem to understand the idea of reasonable doubt, despite numerous explanations from the judge and us that it did not require video footage and twenty eyewitnesses to corraborate every detail in the case. She kept coming up with bizarre explanations for what happened despite the fact that they conflicted with both party’s accounts of the evening. I wanted to punch her by the end of the second day.
Another juror also contended he had reasonable doubt, although he didn’t want to discuss specifically what facts he had doubt about. I later learned that he had researched (incorrectly) the penalties for the crime, despite explicit instructions from the judge not to do so, and thought we were sentencing the guy to years in jail for something he himself clearly didn’t think was a big deal. (The prosecutor told us aftewards that the defendent probably got community service and mandatory anger management training, with no fines or jail time.)
Once we finally reached a guilty verdict on those two counts, I assumed the third would be a cake-walk. The resisting arrest charge simply didn’t fit the definition given by the judge, as the defendent briefly paused in a doorway on his way outside, at which point he was put into a restraining hold. However, one juror (who we learned in jury selection had been hit by boyfriends in the past) refused to agree to a not guilty verdict on anything, and thus went to great semantic lengths to argue that hesitating in a doorway for a second constitutes resisting arrest. We spent another day discussing it with her until she finally relented and we agreed on a not guilty verdict for that one.
All in all, I was amazed by how 12 well educated and otherwise intelligent people could come to such different conclusions and have such different abilities to sort through evidence and make a reasonable decision. I think that posting here really gave me skills I wouldn’t have otherwise had to listen to opinions different than mine and make a convincing argument about what was best fit the facts, without getting upset or calling anybody names. (That last part was very hard sometimes.)
