Tales from the Jury Room

Like a lot people, I've been called to jury duty. actually I've been called three times and sat on three juries. I go, I do my duty, and I think the juries I was on definitely reached the right verdicts. It's been a positive experience. I was even the jury foreman in two of the cases. I know lot of people called to jury duty lose money because of it because being a juror pays about $18.00 a day....next to nothing and not everybody's employer makes up the difference. But I'm retired so for me it's not so bad. That said, there's one thing I want to say. Every time I went to serve on a jury I left the courthouse with a lower opinion of lawyers than I had before I came. l speak only for myself but I think a lot of the jurors I met had the same experience. During deliberations in the jury room we talked, and we weren't always talking about the case. Not surprisingly the lawyers were talked about both when we were seriously deliberating and when we weren't. . The lawyers themselves were somehow, in a way hard to describe , a part of the case and the jury deliberations. What surprised me was how hard it was for some people to set aside their negative personal feelings about a lawyer. I mean they would have a hard time seeing that their negative opinion about the lawyer was influencing how they saw the evidence in the case. We had to make sure we were not somehow holding it against the side that had an ill thought of lawyer. It wasn't easy to do. I and other jurors openly talked about the things below in the jury room.

Generally speaking, stop talking down to us. In one trial for example, one of the lawyers commented in his closing argument that one one the witnesses in the case, a young female bartender at a nightclub, couldn't be expected to care about who she identified as the person who robbed the place. "Come on ladies and gentlemen, she hasn't even got a high school education and she's the bartender at the club. She'd identify anybody the police showed her." He made it sound as if this girl would not care one way or the other if she identified the wrong person as the perpetrator. As if she could have no sense of moral justice because of what she did for a living. This did not sit well with any of us.

Don't get cute. One attorney during his cross examination of a witness mispronounced the witness's last name at least four times after the witness explained and demonstrated the correct pronunciation. After the second time l knew it was intentional. I didn't believe all of what the witness had to say but this lawyer's idea of having fun at the witnesses expense was disappointing.

Don't patronize the jury. At the start of closing arguments 4 of the 6 lawyers involved in three different cases spent the first couple of minutes trying to ingratiate themselves by thanking us on behalf of themselves and their respective clients for all of our time and attention and telling us they knew how difficult it was for us to take time from our busy schedules to serve as jurors. One attorney then went right into explaining the "principles of primacy and recency" to us. "What that simply means is what we hear first and what we hear last are what our memory retains the best", he said. After we reached a verdict we all joked that we'd all probably only remember that this lawyer spent 2 minutes to thank us at the start of his argument and two minutes to thank us at the end of it.

Don't tell us something that we know isn't true. During the jury selection process the judge and the lawyers both asked a lot of questions to ascertain whether each of us prospective jurors would be fair to both sides. I was asked a lot of common sense questions and a lot of strange questions like what kind of books I liked to read...fiction or non-fiction. What magazines did I like to read. And that was fine. I tried to be as candid as I could be. During this process several of the lawyers made it a point to tell us they were asking all their questions because they wanted to that only fair and impartial jurors heard the case. We're not stupid. I know that each lawyer is trying to stack the jury with people who have a predisposition to their side and prejudiced against the other side. I understood that that was you job, but don't try to hide it behind noble intentions. Ask your questions, make your decisions and move on. Don't try to impress me with your sense of fairness.

Don't misstate the evidence to me in your argument to the jury. That happened in all three of the cases I sat on and in each instance it happened most of us on the jury had written notes on what a witness said from the witness stand.

After the case is over I don't really want to answer your questions or explain our verdict to you. That's why I leave with the rest of the group, so I can politely avoid you on the way out as your standing by the elevator waiting for us. If I have questions or want to say something, I know how to approach or contact you.