Jury Service Comes To An End
After two weeks my jury duty came to an end today. Having sat around doing absolutely feck all for the first week, I finally got to sit on a case for the last couple of days, and although it wasn’t the most interesting of cases it could have been a much duller one!
Obviously I’m not able to go into details about the case itself, nor about what was disclosed within the juror room while we deliberated on the case to come to a verdict. But what I can say is that you get all types of people with different personalities and so there’s bound to be a small clash at some point.
There was one girl among us who was what called be called quite chavvy. A 20 year old, fat girl who talked really badly, constantly ate food and generally annoyed the fuck out of me! As a juror you are supposed to debate to come to a verdict. Unless it is a straight forward case there is always going to be opposition and different views on what has been made known to you during the trial.
When we took an initial vote, two of us didn’t agree with the general consensus of opinion and this girl made it known that she didn’t like that, huffing away to herself. Even when we discussed our opinions she blatantly didn’t listen, even though some of the other jurors agreed, or could at least see at what we were getting at. Every time she came back with what she thought was an argument against me it proved that she wasn’t listening to what I was saying and/or didn’t understand. All she knew was that she had to be right!
When people don’t listen to what you’re saying it is really annoying as you feel as though you’re hitting your head against a brick wall, arguing a case for something that they just don’t understand.
I have to admit though, that I was voting against them for tactical reasons. We were adjourned to reach a verdict at about 3.30pm on the Thursday, the penultimate day of our jury service. Had we reached a decision on that day, the case would have finished and there was a very high chance that we could get called back in the next day and then selected for another case that would have lasted into a third week.
My ‘game plan’ was to make this case last until the Friday so that by the time we finished, there would be no more cases that we could be selected for, thereby finishing early and not have to come back the following week.
And it worked. On the Friday morning we were stuffed into our little room to continue our deliberation and after an hour or so (I didn’t want to make it look obvious) we came to a unanimous verdict. The judge accepted it and the case was over. We returned upstairs and about 10 minutes later were told that we could all go home. It was over.
