Jury Duty

A few months ago, after many years of dodging jury duty, I finally got drafted into the jury for a civil case. An employee had sued his employer for retaliatory termination of his employment because he claimed that he had protested the firing of his coworker earlier. He had already found another job and wasn’t asking for much, just a few months of lost pay. So, I was relieved that I was not making a life or death decision. It just meant that I would lose 3 weeks of work stuck in the court. I had to make up for that later by staying longer hours at work, but I was not too upset about it and was looking forward to getting a hands-on experience with the American justice system at a safe distance.

Most of the trial was spent on going over a bunch of Email messages among several thousand pages of email correspondence. So, it lacked the courtroom drama you see on the TV shows, no Perry Mason surprises, no theatrical performances at the closing arguments, etc. Both sides did present their case well, although the employer’s defense team were more organized and appeared more confident and aggressive.

For me, the most interesting part was the few hours that we spent in the jury room to decide the case. As you know, jurors are not supposed to talk about the case before the end of the closing arguments before they are sent to a room to decide the case, not with each other and not with anyone else. This gag rule, by the way, annoyed my wife a lot. I told her if I discussed it with you, I might be influenced by anything you might say. Of course, we were free to talk about it after the case was over. The Judge also made a long speech about keeping an open mind and not forming an opinion before completing deliberations. So, after the case was handed to us, we went to a room to talk about the case for the first time.

The first thing that struck me was that despite judges long speech about the importance of deliberations, almost everyone was eager to get it over with by a quick vote especially since in a civil suit we were not required to reach a unanimous decision. If it wasn’t for me and another juror, we had made the decision in five minutes. We insisted that at least we should present our reasons behind our opinions. The next surprise for me was that except for a couple of them, not many could come up with a logical argument for their opinion. It seemed to me that one or two strongly opinionated and somewhat charismatic jurors sort of led the discussion and argued for the rest. Of course, I with my foreign accent and middle-eastern face and soft voice was not one of them. I enjoyed my role as sort of a devil advocate that forced them to stay in the Jury room longer than they wanted to. A few jurors did thank me at the end though, because they said I made them think through their decision. I wonder if this dynamic happens in other juries as well, and weather I would have been more persistent if the case was of a more serious nature.

There was another thing that surprised me. The case was not directly related to sexual harassment and we did not have to make a determination on that in this case, but one of the things that happened in the Company that employed the plaintiff was that the general manager was engaged in a lot of inappropriate behavior at the office, from sending pornographic picture through email to others including the female staff to performing mock striptease in front of everyone. There was an environment in that office that would make a textbook example for a sexual harassment training manual. I was not surprised by what was going on in that office, what surprised me was the general attitude of some the jurors toward this issue. Sexual harassment has been a major issue in the past few decades in the US and is discussed in books, TV shows, seminars, etc. Every corporation in the US is required by law to have training on it and prevent it from happening, so one can assume that the level of awareness is high in the society. But I was surprised that many of the jurors including a few women did not see that situation as a sexual harassment. One female juror who was a teacher even commented on how attractive the General Manager was and she did not believe the testimony of a female employee who testified that she was offended by what was going on in that office. "She must have liked it". This made me realize how difficult it would be to convince juries in sexual harassment cases here even when evidence is so overwhelming.

Anyway, the attorneys for the defense (employer in the case) were so confident that the deliberations would not last past lunch time and the jury would rule in their favor, that they had even made reservations in a nearby restaurant and invited everyone in the jury to lunch! Of course, I didn’t go :)