I spent the last 4 days of my life serving on a jury. This blog is dedicated to things that make me happy, so trust me there’s a lot about this experience that I will not be writing about it. This could definitely be a long ranty post about a fairly miserable experience, but instead I am going to focus on the few bright spots of the whole thing. For people who know me in real life I will be happy to talk all the details now that I’m free to talk about the case. I won’t be discussing case specifics here.

I have been summoned to jury duty before, but this is the first time I have ever actually been placed on a jury. The only trials I have ever seen are the fictional ones on television, so it was kind of interesting to actually see a real trial. Now that I’ve seen one I don’t really feel compelled to ever see another one, so feel free to never call me for jury duty ever again Baltimore City. As if I would ever be so lucky. I am also happy that the case though criminal was for something that was pretty straightforward and literally had no victims. I think it took some of the pressure off.

I am also happy about the other people who served on the jury with me. For reasons I won’t get into, partly because I actually don’t know the real answer as to why, this trial that was supposed to be done on Tuesday dragged on into Thursday with much of our time not actually in the trial but instead cooped up in a tiny jury room that the first two days was the approximate temperature of the sun. Despite the inconveniences everyone stayed very positive. There was minimal complaining, and actually a lot of laughter. One of the women there said she has served on 9 trials and this was by far the best group of people she has served with. One of my fellow jurors even brought in doughnuts for everyone Thursday morning.

There were six charges we had to decide on and we very quickly came into agreement on the 5 minor ones. The larger one we discussed for awhile, but in the long run pretty easily agreed that there was a reasonable doubt on that one. I felt like we gave the defendant a fair trial, and I am happy with the outcome. Now what would make me even happier would be if I never have to do this again.