I was on a jury for a 4 day civil trial a few months ago. It was a wrongful death case related to a traffic accident.

I was thinking that I could deal with a criminal case better than the civil case I had, but reading your account, I'm not sure that it's that much different.

In my civil trial, we in the jury didn't have access to the police report on the accident. We didn't learn if anyone was cited. We didn't get access to a lot of evidence about the accident that might have swayed our opinions. Since it was a civil case, the state had no role other than to insure a fair proceeding, so we only got to see the evidence that the two sides decided to present. It was tempting to second guess the two sides on why they presented X but didn't present Y, but when you're in the room you can only use evidence presented in the court.

We were all pretty much on the same page from the beginning of deliberations, but there was a lot of discussion about the details to make sure we didn't miss anything. We all did our best to weigh the evidence that we had, and talked about the implications of our decisions for both sides. At the end of the process, we voted and we found for the victim's widow.

It was an interesting experience, and made me feel good that my fellow citizens really do take things like this seriously even though there was a lot of grumbling about the time spent waiting around and the time we spent away from work.

About 10 years ago there was a traffic accident in the yard of the house we were renting. A car went around a corner too fast on a wet road and hit a tree. They guy wasn't hurt, but the car and the tree were damaged. The police report about the accident (submitted to the home owners for insurance coverage) had an amazing number of errors. The street name was wrong, the compass directions were wrong, the side of the street was wrong, etc., etc. Recalling that made me unsurprised about what happened in your case. I'm sure it's very common for details like that to be wrong even in important cases where lives and treasure are at stake. It's good that Mr. P. wasn't wrongly convicted in your case.

I think that more of our fellow citizens would have greater respect for the judicial system if they served on juries. I also think it would be nice if the default reaction wasn't to be regarded as a Martian if one doesn't try to get out of it.

Cheers,
Scott.