Jury Service

[Carbomb]

My mum's had the bad luck of being called up three times, which means she's now on a list that says she can't be selected again.

[davertfnewman]

My jury duty experience was twenty years ago when I worked in Blockbuster. Actually made my best two weeks of earnings from the experience.

 

Two main cases were an assault and theft/perverting the course of justice. The former was a case of two lads in a care home getting into a row and one stabbing the other in the leg with a pair of scissors. Everything was pretty consistent, so we determined the attacker was guilty, departing before the sentencing, which was likely going to be a youth offenders place.

 

The latter was more complicated. An Asian truck driver got an agency job driving around electrical goods from a warehouse in Walsall. He said he stopped at a lay-by in Lichfield, at which point he was accosted by a group of men who blindfolded him, tied him up, made off with the lorry and dumped him in a ditch in Stoke, where he was found the next morning by a dog walker.

 

However, analysis of his mobile phone usage put him at an undisclosed point in Wolverhampton. He said it was actually his cannabis dealer and he'd not said anything so that he didn't get into trouble. Of course, this was actually the location where his mates ransacked the van and stored the stuff inside to sell later. They arrested him and two mates, one of which looked like Brian Harvey with psoriasis and the other looked like a short version of Kurrgan.

 

The trial started off with the world's most boring expert on mobile phones, who took so long that the judge even commented "Yes, I think I know how a mobile phone tower works now, thank you!". It all ended before it had really gotten going, though, when we all got sent out for lunch and the Brian Harvey lookalike threatened an old female juror outside the court while having a cigarette with the guards ("I didn't do it! Don't say I did it or else I'll do you!"). She reported it to a bailiff, meaning the jury had to be disbanded and the bloke got sent down for thirty days for contempt of court.

[SuperBacon]

4 minutes ago, davertfnewman said:

one of which looked like Brian Harvey with psoriasis and the other looked like a short version of Kurrgan.

 

Fantastic.

[Mr_Danger]

At least you didn’t have to stay another day.

[MungoChutney]

I did a high court case in 2018. It was a sexual assault case and both the accused and the accuser were under 16 at the time of the alleged offence.  It was an absolute horrible experience listening to the evidence and watching the behaviour of both the prosecution and the defence. They would have said absolutely anything to discredit the others witnesses. The prosecution handled things so badly that it was impossible to see why it had even come to court, the evidence was so weak and poorly delivered. I absolutely understand the difficulty in sexual assault cases and would always advocate that you believe the victim when an accusation is made. However you can't do that on a jury and the way the case was put together it was impossible to see anything except massive amounts of doubt, well beyond reasonable. Police had handled it awfully from the outset too. There's more to it that I won't go into but we effectively had two children with traumatic backgrounds being re-traumatised through this whole charade. At one point a prosecution witness appeared to be about to commit perjury and had to be warned by the judge to very careful.  

Like Raid I was left despairing for my sanity by fellow jury members. Being in Scotland we had three verdict options. On the first ballot after talking through things for around an hour it was 0 guilty, 5 not guilty and 10 not proven. That's a majority not proven verdict and case closed. Not so for two of them who said we should talk it over more because the lunch was good and they'd like to have it one more time before being discharged. Another guy said he'd like to deliberate further just because he thought it would be better than this.

I was called up again recently with my 5 years having expired. I was able to get an exemption due to having a foot injury at the time but fully expect the letter to appear again shortly. Would hate to be picked again,. especially if it's something like that again. 

Edited July 10 by MungoChutney

[JNLister]

If you don't fancy it: https://youtu.be/94zkBGm1IoU?si=X7TOEGsONNkXXGzz

[Jazzy G]

My mum's been called up for it, but I don't think she ended up having to be a juror. She'd just go and wait at the court in Preston, have Subway for lunch, then come home again. 

I don't know whether I'd have the attention span for something like that. I'd probably pore over any evidence or summaries, but have a terrible feeling that it'd be really hard to concentrate in the actual court room. 

[air_raid]

1 hour ago, Jazzy G said:

I don't know whether I'd have the attention span for something like that. I'd probably pore over any evidence or summaries, but have a terrible feeling that it'd be really hard to concentrate in the actual court room. 

Nothing prepares you for the size of the folders dumped in front of you. It's a tough ask to only open them when instructed. Yes, the prosecution have you open page 322 to view where a particular call was made from, but if you notice on page 323 she's calling the ex boyfriend at 3AM in a behaviour uncharacteristic of the victim from what you've learned... shit, sorry, where are we now?

[JNLister]

I did it back in 2007 and although it was officially Manchester Crown Court, we were in an overspill courtroom that was basically a shitty meeting room in Stockport. We had two pretty minor cases and it was frustrating how it was clearly (and intentionally) an exercise in two sides debating rather than the process try to find out what actually happened. Ultimately one case came down to "whatever verdict we give could be wrong, so which consequences of being wrong can we least live with" and the other was "is there any benefit to anyone in this guy having a criminal record"?

[Ronnie]

I was called a few years back and was looking forward to it: even bought plenty of new clothes for it!

Unfortunately, I was one of those people left on standby. And in a double dose of bad luck, there were only two courtrooms in operation, since this was coming out of the pandemic ... and a previous case was overrunning. So we had two sets of jurors plus back-ups for only one courtroom. I and the new clothes were sent home.

[JLM]

I did mine at Preston crown court. Depressing reminder of how old I am that it was 18 years ago! I know it's supposed to be a random-ish selection but man they got me at the right time. Moved back home after Uni, hadn't found a job and had no idea what I was doing next. Shortly before I got the letter I completed Resident Evil 4 on Gamecube over two solid days of playing it near-continuously, such was the free time I had on my hands. 

A lot of my jury service time consisted of sitting around playing on my DS and reading Desperation by Stephen King. 

Had two near misses:

One was a road rage incident which I was a touch disappointed to miss out on. Our 15 was selected but I didn't make the final 12. Woman in her car sat at traffic lights. The lights had gone green but she hadn't noticed for whatever reason. The person behind her honked their horn. She felt they were honking excessively, so she got out and shattered their front windscreen with her handbag. Allegedly. 

Second one I was honestly relieved I didn't have to sit through at the time. It was a sexual assault case where the guy had done lots of very unpleasant sounding things to his wife. It wasn't disputed that they had happened, but he claimed they were consensual and she disagreed. The couple were both from Afghanistan speaking through interpreters and she was crying before the proceedings started. It was all utterly horrendous. I can't remember exactly why, but the whole thing didn't end up going ahead and we were sent back to the waiting area. 

The one I ended up sitting on was thankfully much less harrowing for my 21 year old sensibilities. A DSG Group (Dixons/Currys/PC World) truck had been hijacked and the trailer stolen. The contents of the trailer had then been found in a warehouse belonging to a small family owned haulage firm. The father and son were both on trial for handling stolen goods. It became apparent that the son had agreed to the whole thing, but on arrival the father had allowed it to stay there when it was very clear it had been stolen. The son also had a satnav in his car and a TV and sound system in his house that had all come from the truck.

I remember it being the first time I had appreciated the role of the prosecutor. I'd seen a lot of fictional representations of trials where our hero is wrongly accused and the prosecutor is a heartless monster trying to get the guilty verdict at any cost. In this case, though, they were both pretty obviously guilty.

The evidence was damning. They had both given full confessions under questioning to start, but even back then I knew that counts for very little under police interrogation. However, all of the stolen goods had the DSG group stickers and branding all over them, the son had a large sum of cash he couldn't explain at his house and was using several of the stolen items, they could produce no paper trail to explain why they would have DSG group products sitting in their warehouse. The reason the police went to their warehouse is because they'd caught the truck hijacker and he confirmed he had delivered the goods to said warehouse and had agreed with the son he could leave them there for a few days in exchange for a large sum of cash. There was more too, but that's just off the top of my head. 

However, in court they both recanted their confessions. The father said he had no idea the goods were stolen and wouldn't have let them stay there if he had, which didn't hold up to much scrutiny. The son said a guy named John was behind it all. A guy named John had said he needed to store some legitimately purchased electronic goods in the warehouse but insisted on paying cash. The prosecutor picking apart the John story was so entertaining that several of us on the jury were clearly struggling to keep it together. By the time he delivered his "I put it to you, that 'John' is a FABRICATION" I could see a some shoulders bobbing up and down and had to look down at the floor. 

We then spent TWO FULL DAYS deliberating it because one guy would not budge on the dad. He said the guy reminded him of his dad, he doesn't seem like a bad guy and he'd made a bad decision. We unanimously agreed with that but, crucially, he was still guilty of knowingly handling stolen goods. I tried to reason with him, saying I would be horrified if we were voting guilty because "he seems like a wrong'un" or "looks a bit shifty" etc. etc. so we can't vote not guilty on the same basis. We also argued that sentencing would take into account that he has no previous criminal history, is less culpable than the son and probably did indeed make an iffy snap decision when he saw the shit turn up, rather than being any kind of criminal mastermind. At the end of the second day he finally switched to guilty. I did sympathise with him, but some of the other jurors lost their rag because, in truth, we had all expected deliberation to take around 10 minutes.

In the years since I have been radicalised by the woke mob and lost all of my faith in the police and criminal justice systems though, so there's every chance I'd be guy number 12 now for a lot of minor charges, drug offences and anything relating to sex work. Nahhh mate that could be any number of green plants in that photo. Lot of people need industrial heat lamps in their attic, they get very chilly. 

The son got 18 months in prison. The dad received an intermittent custody order, or "weekend prison" as the scheme was known colloquially. So he'd be in prison for half the week but able to live at home under monitor the rest of the time, so he could keep his business running and theoretically reduce his risk of reoffending. I don't think that's a sentence which exists any more in the UK, though might be wrong about that. At the time it sounded very sensible to me. 

All in all it was a very interesting experience and I'm glad I did it. 3 stars.

Edited July 11 by JLM

[neil]

1 hour ago, JLM said:

We then spent TWO FULL DAYS deliberating it because one guy would not budge on the dad. He said the guy reminded him of his dad, he doesn't seem like a bad guy and he'd made a bad decision

This is why I would hate to be tried by a jury.

[CharlesTuckerTheThird]

See if you can get them to do a Trial By Combat, spice it up a bit.

[quote the raven]

I did back when i worked for eurotunnel.

Full pay inc night shift allowance and no weekends....Most of the time we would go in wait a hour and be told to go home. When we did get a case it was so poorly put together that two of the jury thought the prosecution was the defence. 

Deliberated for no lie 5 minutes then decided we best wait for a bit before going out and giving the news.  When i was asked if i wanted to stay on for another case i jumped at it, sadly they deselected me so i had to go back to work. 

I remember talking to another group who had been weeks and weeks on a fraud case they had more or less checked out from the whole process 

Edited July 12 by quote the raven