Jury duty

So this is different. This afternoon at 4:30, I finished serving on a jury. My first jury ever. Yes, I'm almost sixty.

The judge gave us several pep talks. In one he said, As American citizens you have three privileges: to pay taxes, to vote, and to serve on juries. Of course he immediately added that some people might not consider all of those to be "privileges": but, he went on, the system is designed around jury participation and can't work without it.

And it was an interesting experience. It was a civil case, not a criminal one; and in fact in an earlier phase the defendant had already been found liable to pay "suitable damages" to the plaintiff. It was our job to determine what constituted "suitable damages".

In the end we awarded him less than he had asked for, but more than the defendant had suggested. Indeed, our number came awfully close to being the arithmetical average between the two positions, but that's not how we arrived at it. (And in fact we were forbidden to arrive at it that way.)

What interested me most was learning that we as jurors were allowed to ask questions of the witnesses. Not directly, of course. We would put written questions on the ledge of the jury box; then from time to time the bailiff would sweep up all the questions that had accumulated and pass them to the judge. The judge would decide whether each question could be legally asked; if a question could be asked, he passed it to the clerk, who made copies for each of the attorneys ... and then, finally, one of the attorneys would ask the question.

And the question itself was interesting, because it involved the conflicting opinions of two different expert witnesses. Was one of them lying, or in cahoots with one side? Or was it just a hard question, on which expert opinions could honestly differ? (I suspect the latter.) Why did each expert witness look at a set of data that managed neatly to exclude any of the other guy's data? And what if we tried to analyze the question fresh for ourselves? (The group contained three engineers -- plus me -- so this is actually what we started to do.)

Anyway, we stayed awake and we submitted a steady stream of engaged questions. This led the judge and the opposing attorneys all to tell us what a great jury we were. The plaintiff's attorney said he has literally had to drop a big stack of books during the trial to make enough noise to wake a sleeping juror. Maybe the bar we had to clear to rank as a "great jury" wasn't actually all that high. 😊

But it was fun. And a novelty for me.