This was my first experience with being on a jury. It was fine, but frustrating. Prior to this, I didn't know that everything seems to take forever. And when you get in the jury room, things that you thought were obvious are not obvious to others. And that when everybody lies on the stand, you have a bunch of conflicting evidence that none of the jurors can agree on.
Here's the summary: a couple who lives together has a fight. The woman leaves and goes to her sister's place. She doesn't pick up when the man calls her, so he drives over to the sister's place. In the meantime, a friend (who is also a delivery guy) delivers a pizza to the two sisters. The man sees the two sisters and the pizza guy talking in the apartment parking lot and drives into the pizza guy's car, causing damage. He gets out of the car and says that he's caught his girlfriend (i.e. cheating). He and his girlfriend resume the fight. He wants her to come with him and talk. She says no, you always go too far. He picks her up and brings her toward his car. He puts her down. They continue arguing. She agrees to go with him. He puts her in the back seat of the car and he drives away.
They are still in a relationship, but there is a protective order that prevents them from seeing each other.
This was a bilingual case, and we were told to ignore everything but what was in English, be it the written translations of 911 calls or the interpreter on the stand. Several of the jurors understood the original language.
The defendant doesn't testify, which is his right. The alleged victim, the pizza guy and the sister all testify, along with a police officer, who is only responsible for part of the scene of the 911 call.
During the trial I thought the whole thing was a mess. I was sure that we were not going to convict. But then I flipped. And there were two days of arguing. And that conflict in the jury room, although not angry, was awful. I started to shut down. Two others and I were the holdouts for conviction on all counts. It was hard.
It's not like I *wanted* to convict the guy. But I felt like I was interpreting the evidence and the instructions the way that the court was asking us to.
We were split on three of the four counts, and not even close. We asked for help from the judge, and the judge asked us to reread a specific line of the instructions. Suuuuuper unhelpful. We're not dummies.
We decided to see if overnight thoughts helped. They did not. I, for one, could not sleep. Also I felt trapped by my fellow jurors who sometimes followed instructions and sometimes did not, especially where translations were concerned. Or they'd tell me I wasn't allowed to consider something a certain way, but if they used the same methodology to make their own argument they didn't realize they were doing the same thing they'd disregarded when I was speaking. It started to feel unfair. I started to feel exceptionally miserable. I went into the last day of deliberation super bummed.
We turned in our votes and the judge asked us return to the jury room to deliberate further. I actually gave her angry eyes. Especially when she said that if we needed guidance, to ask. That made me so mad because that was total performative bullshit. Her help was proven to be unhelpful before.
We went back. I said swear words, and shared that this case was too complicated to be tried as a single trial, my frustration about all of the conflicting evidence, and that we couldn't even start over and decide which pieces of evidence were valid for the four counts. On these things we all agreed. The person who I disagreed with most said we had to have an open mind. I calmly explained that I'd been on her side until we started deliberating, and that was a large example of me having an open mind. One guy got super passionate and started smacking the post-it board. There were disagreements over whether, in thinking about false imprisonment regarding the man picking the woman up, you could consider anything that happened before (like that the guy had just driven into another guy's car and loudly said that he'd caught his girlfriend cheating with him).
The whole thing went down in flames. Mistrial on three counts, except for the hit and run.
In the past six weeks I've had Covid, my mom died and I had to clean out her apartment, our beloved friends were here (that was the good part), and then my vacation was truncated by two weeks of jury duty.
It's too much, man. I want some normalcy.
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