Trina's page of Blogginess

This just in.. I'm done! Yay! I've fulfilled my jury duty commitment - for the year, at least.

The whole process what actually very interesting, and I'm happy to have had the experience. It was a criminal assault case. We listened to witnesses for 3 full days, then spent a day (Thursday) deliberating. We came to a unanimous verdict by the end of the afternoon. We read our verdict to the judge and the court Thursday afternoon, and quite frankly, made the assumption that we were done. To our surprise, we were asked to return to the jury room. The judge said that she had to discuss "something" with the attorneys. An hour later, we were thanked for reaching a verdict, and we were instructed to return to court on Tuesday at 10:00am.

Huh?

So, we all went home - confused, a little disgruntled because we weren't told why we needed to return.
I figured our questions would be answered first thing this morning.

We all returned this morning at 10:00, and were instructed to please come back again at 10:45.

ugh

We all came back at 10:45, and waited outside the courtroom for another 45 minutes before they finally asked us to come back in.

The judge thanked us again, and told us that we were dismissed. Apparently, they were in court all morning discussing an issue that they thought they might need us for, but in the end, they decided to have the judge make the final ruling.

So that was the anticlimactic end to my week+ of serving on jury duty.

All in all, it was actually a good experience. It was an interesting enough case, and it was good to learn how the whole system works.