Have you ever served in jury duty?

Question

If so, please share your experience with me. Do you think that the jury selection reflected the diversity of your community?
Do you think people were prejudiced and biased toward a certain race, sex, way of behavior.
If you ever were to be tried, would you rather a jury trial or a bench trial (one that is done by a judge)

Answer 1

I was a juror on a case where a drug addict had been murdered for stealing drugs. The jury had 6 whites and 6 blacks and both the defendant and the victim was black. The prosecutor proved that the defendant was a member of a gang that sold drugs, and that the drugs were stolen from his gang, but had no solid evidence that he and not someone else had committed the crime. We ended with a hung jury with 5 guilty votes(3 were black men 2 were white women). We later learned that this was the third trial, and the 2 other juries had also split almost equally. What I found surprising and depressing was that everyone on the jury under 40 voted guilty and no one over 50 did,.Some jurors even said that they voted guilty because they thought the defendant was potentially dangerous and the did not want him free to walk the streets, even if he had not committed the crime he was being tried for. That the younger jurors did not feel the duty of a juror to be a finder of fact but felt free to express their personal fears and biases still bothers me. Maybe the ability to judge abstractly comes with age, but I fear it is actually a generational difference, and that fair trials will be harder to obtain in the future.

Answer 2

I've never had jury duty.

I think though that people are always biased at some point, we each have our different ideas and such. Which is kind of the point of the jury system, to prevent any one group from letting biases take over.

And if I should ever need a trial of that size, I would prefer a jury trial to that of a bench trial. In a jury trial, if even one holds out and maintains a vote of not guilty then I get acquitted. On the other hand, a bench trial has only one mind to change. A jury trial would be 12 different chances to get an acquittal, while a bench trial is only one.

Answer 3

I was on a jury once. It was a big, complicated case and it lasted seven weeks!

The jury selection process was interesting to watch. It would be very easy to get off the jury! For instance, a gun was involved in this crime, and anyone who said they were 'afraid' of guns was let go. And some people even admitted to being racially prejudiced and were let go. Everyone was asked 'Do you want to be on this jury'? and if they said yes they were let go. (It turns out that defense lawyers know that anyone who says he wants to be on a jury it's because he wants to put someone in jail!) I said I'd never been on a jury and it would be an interesting experience but I had a job and I had plans for the next few weeks. But I got chosen anyway. The jury was very diverse--men and women, various races, etc. But I live in an area that is very diverse. I got to talk to them all in seven weeks and some were highly educated while others just barely understood what was going on. We weren't supposed to discuss the trial with each other, but at lunch we would often answer each other's questions.

The jury I was on spent most of their time in the jury lounge doing jigsaw puzzles while they argued about evidence in the courtroom, about what evidence was allowed to be used in the trial. After we had returned our verdict the prosecuting lawyer spent some time with us to show us the evidence we hadn't been allowed to see, and it all made the defendants look even more guilty.

Would I want a jury trial? It's hard to say. I think it would depend on the crime I was accused of, and whether I was guilty. 8^) I have heard that juries often react to the severity of the crime, not the evidence of guilt, and my experience seems to bear that out. We tended to trust the 'victims' more than the defendants. There were many unanswered questions in my mind. OTOH from what I've seen of judges I think they're just as likely to be prejudiced as the general population.

Answer 4

I was called once, selected as an alternate, and then excused, which made me really glad, because they had the accused in the box ,and one look at the guy's face somehow convinced me he was guilty, and there is no way I could have given the evidence unbiased attention ... I was really surprised by my reaction to seeing him because I always thought of myself as being non prejudicial and open minded