Jury Duty

So now that I'm free to talk about my experience I decided to blog about it. It ended up being a four day trial. We went from 8-5pm the first day, 8:45-5 the next two days, and only from 8:45-around 3pm the last day, which was Monday. It was really hard for me to sit there quietly and not comment to my neighbor about remarks made or to discuss it after I got home. There were so many questions I would have liked to ask the witnesses. So I got to know the other jury members pretty well because we had a lot of breaks where we just had to sit in the deliberation room while we waited and we couldn't talk about the case so we talked about anything else we could think of. This was one part that I enjoyed. We laughed a lot.
We heard from a ton of witnesses and I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep it all straight but I did remember some things that some of the others had missed, so it made me feel good to know I had really paid the best attention that I could. When we finally got to the deliberation part we did a secret vote right away. I was not ready to make a decision so I said undecided. That vote ended with 9 guilty, 2 undecided, and 1 not guilty. Somehow I became the spokeswoman for the ones who did not vote guilty. I gave my reasoning behind it and the other undecided said that I said exactly what she was thinking. Two of the other jurors tried to change my mind. I explained everything honestly how I felt. Eventually I decided that perhaps I was giving her too much the benefit of the doubt and that if I just looked at the evidence presented, in order for her to be not guilty it would take a long series of circumstances to have to be a certain way for her to have told the truth. I didn't say that it was impossible, but it was very highly unlikely. So with that I said that I was okay with saying guilty. The other two women agreed that I made sense and that it was more probable that she was guilty than not, but that there was no way for us to know 100% which is impossible so we ended up being unanimous with guilty.
We went into the courtroom and gave the verdict. We chose a foreperson who was okay with reading a guilty verdict. Then they polled all of us. I was the first to be polled and I again said guilty. I did feel good about the decision so I had no problem being polled. I didn't look at the defendant, her lawyer, or her family though. I guess I knew I would smile if I did, and then that would just be a slap in the face to them. But others did look and they said they felt really guilty. I thought that was interesting because they sure didn't feel guilty in the deliberation room when they chose guilty before even talking it out.
I really wish I could tell the defendant that if she is innocent that she needs a new lawyer and she needs to fill in a lot of gaps that she left opened, and then she should appeal. I think if she is guilty than she'll just accept it and move on. I can expect to hear the sentencing in two-four weeks. I'm really curious what it will be. I don't expect it to be anything too horrible because she was only charged with two counts of forgery or fraud, and one count of intending to steal $1000-20000 on a false pretense, and one count of stealing $1000-20000 on a false pretense.
All in all, I'm glad I got to do it. It caused for a lot of hassle with the kids but I learned from the experience.