Few people react to a jury summons with excitement. In fact, some people don’t register to vote largely because they’re afraid of being called to serve. Hate to disappoint you, but that’s not the only way prospective jurors are selected. Have a driver’s license? Own property? The state taps into all sorts of data sources to find jurors, so not voting won’t save you.
I’ve been called a half-dozen times but served only once. Several years ago, I was selected as Juror #11 in a murder trial. It was a cold-case homicide that happened at a construction site in Avon. The defendant was arrested in California for a different crime many years later and his DNA matched evidence from the Avon crime. I was shocked to be selected, since I knew the judge, prosecutor, and deputy prosecutor fairly well, was an elected official, and grew up in a family full of police officers. I’m still amazed the defense attorney didn’t reject me outright.
Interestingly, our task wasn’t to determine guilt, because the defendant had confessed. We were tasked with determining whether he would be convicted of murder or the lesser charge of manslaughter. Did he deliberately kill the victim or was the death an unintended accident? Either way, he was headed to prison. It was just a matter of how long he’d be there.
The deputy prosecutor opened the case by showing us poster-sized crime scene photos, and try as I may, I’ve never been able to erase those images from my mind. The murder was beyond bloody — the prosecutor later told me it was the most brutal crime she’d seen in Hendricks County. One of the things I was surprised to learn is that jury members are allowed to question witnesses. I did so only once, asking the medical examiner if the blood spatter offered hints as to how many times the defendant struck the victim. (It did.)
If you’ve never participated in a criminal or civil trial, know that it’s nothing like what happens on Law & Order. Nobody rushes into the room with a blue piece of paper that turns the case upside-down, nor do the lawyers attack and scream at each other, with everyone screaming “Objection!” It’s a remarkably businesslike process. Those technical issues you see on TV shows are generally dealt with long before the jury has been selected. The trial took several days, and the bailiff kept us well-fed.
It took the better part of an afternoon to reach the verdict, largely because one juror kept offering alternate theories of what may have happened. Whether she worked in the medical field or watched a lot of Gray’s Anatomy, she was clearly trying to impress us with her anatomical knowledge. I gently kept reminding the group that the judge said we could only consider what had been presented in court. Eventually, we voted unanimously to convict the defendant of murder, and the judge sentenced him to 60 years behind bars — likely a life sentence, given his age.
Can’t say it was fun, but it was fascinating, and I performed my civic duty.