Rules, Law and Crime

Story · all 20 words

Ten Days on a Jury

The letter arrives and your first feeling is irritation, and your second is a small guilty excitement, and then you spend a fortnight trying to get out of it.

I did jury service in 2018. Ten working days at a Crown Court in a building with terrible coffee and a car park that cost more than lunch.

What nobody tells you is how much of it is waiting. You sit in a room with forty strangers for two days before anybody calls your name. People do jigsaws. There is a television nobody watches.

The trial I was on lasted six days. The rules on what a juror may say about it afterwards are extremely strict, so I will say only that it involved a serious road offence, that the defendant was twenty-four, and that the victim was in the room every day with her sister.

The thing that changed how I think was not the verdict. It was watching the machinery.

You are told, on the first morning, in plain language, that the defendant is innocent until the prosecution proves otherwise, and that if you are not sure you must say not guilty. Everybody nods. Everybody has heard this on television.

Then you sit with it for six days and you discover it is an extremely uncomfortable instruction, because human beings do not naturally think that way. We arrive with a story already assembled. I had one by the end of the first afternoon and I had to keep taking it apart.

There was one witness whose account was completely certain and, by the third day, demonstrably wrong about the weather, the time and the direction of travel. She was not lying. She was a decent woman who genuinely believed every word, and watching that happen in front of me was the single most useful thing I have ever seen.

I had assumed, before that fortnight, that the police arrest a suspect and charge him when they are fairly sure. What I had not understood is how much space there is between fairly sure and certain, and that the whole apparatus exists to live in that space.

We were out for four and a half hours. There were two counts. On the first, eleven of us agreed within twenty minutes. On the second, we went round the table for three hours and finished ten to two, and we were told that was enough, and I have thought about those two people since.

One of them, a man in his sixties who had barely spoken all week, said something at about half past three that I have never forgotten: “I think he probably did it. I do not think they have shown me that he did it.”

That is the entire system in one sentence and he had worked it out on his own in a room with a broken radiator.

The judge passed sentence the following week and we were not there. I looked it up. Custodial, suspended, plus a fine and a two-year ban from driving.

The defendant was not a criminal in the way I had imagined that word before I went in. He was twenty-four, and the crime was one appalling piece of stupidity in a five-second window on a Tuesday, which he had unquestionably committed. Both those things are true at once and I had not previously understood that they could be.

And the victim was still going to have the injuries afterwards whatever twelve strangers decided, which nobody says out loud in that building because there is nothing useful to say.

I came out of it with far more respect for the process and far less faith in witnesses, including myself.

Most people break the law in small ways constantly – I drove home from the court at thirty-six miles an hour in a thirty – and most of us get away with it every single time, and the difference between us and him is not character. It is five seconds and who else was on the road.

I would do it again. I would not volunteer, but I would do it again.