As of this year I’ve had my first experience serving on a jury, in a criminal case in a California court. Years of TV and a few school electives told me what to expect, while still knowing an actual trial probably wouldn’t be like that at all. And…it was and it wasn’t! Hence this post.

I’m not going to talk very much about the specific case, partly because (spoiler) we ended up with a deadlocked jury and thus a mistrial, and therefore they’ll most likely be doing this all over again in the future. But more than that, even though the charges in this case were relatively minor, the defendant is still a person and deserves some privacy and respect.

Voir dire

Jury duty begins by reporting to a particular room in the courthouse. After watching a series of videos on what jury duty was all about (including “Implicit Bias 101”), the entire room of maybe 80 people was summoned to the “department” where the trial would take place, which presumably has some technical difference from “courtroom” but I don’t know it. After an introductory message from the judge, the first order of business began: going through everybody who needed to get out of jury duty for “hardship” reasons. (The judge snuck a note of derision into this plan, since the instructions on the summons card told how to do that ahead of time. Going through the maybe twenty people’s complaints took over an hour, so I’m inclined to agree with them.)

The rest of us didn’t have to sit through that, thankfully, but that left most of us waiting…in the large hallway between all the courtrooms. I suppose we were allowed to go back to the original room we were summoned to, but nobody wanted to be that far from the courtroom when it was time to come back in. Still, this was a repeated oddity, to have dozens of people in relatively casual clothes (compared to the sharply-dressed lawyers and the sheriffs in uniform) milling about and taking up the few benches outside the courtrooms.

“Voir dire” refers to the jury selection process, and is, as the judge pointed out, an American jury system term that comes from French rather than directly from Latin. One of the lawyers told us it meant “to speak the truth”, and that sent my language enthusiast brain tingling—surely “voir” is “see”, as in “au revoir”? But apparently this is an Old French word that shares roots with “verity”, and not the modern “voir” at all; the lawyer got it right and I was wrong. Which, well, sounds obvious in retrospect that a lawyer would know more about legal terms than me. Oops.

From there, 24 people were chosen randomly and called up to sit in the jury box, with a few extra chairs set out to fit that many (an actual criminal jury here is 12 members + 2 alternates). On the record, each person had to state their name, time lived in San Francisco, and a number of other facts, like whether they had served on a jury before and if so whether that jury reached a verdict. The judge and attorneys asked follow-up questions about personal connections to legal professionals, to law enforcement, and to the general topics of the case.

Some people were obviously not going to be a good fit—one person early on said something along the lines of “I hate the police and I won’t trust anything they say in this trial”. Even if they’re just trying to get out of jury duty, it’s a pretty good indicator that they might not take it seriously later. The judge dismissed this person and a few others who were obviously not going to do well; beyond that, the prosecution and the defense took turns “thanking and excusing” jurors they felt would not be good for them. The defense took advantage of this much more than the prosecution, with the judge mentioning they only get 10 strikes total.

Even those of us who were not in the initial set of 24 were directed to pay attention to all the questions, so that as jurors got dismissed the next group to be called up could say “yep, I’ve been listening and I don’t have anything to say about the topics that have been covered”. Which meant we were all sitting in the audience, actively listening and keeping track of things, but not having any participation ourselves. It felt like being in a day of meetings at work, and I could understand the judge’s daily schedule: start at 9AM, short break around 10:30, lunch break 12-1:30, short break around 3:00, end day at 4:30. Any more than that and your brain would be fried.

But if it was rough for us, it felt worse for the defendant, who also had to sit through all this while both attorneys came up with hypothetical scenarios to ask the jury about—some milder than their actual charge, some worse. They don’t have anything to contribute, and can’t speak on the record at this time, but they have to be present. That’s already a punishment of sorts. I don’t know if it’s deliberate that the jury box is on the prosecution’s side of the courtroom—perhaps related to how the prosecution’s side is “The People” (which, of course, the defense refers to as “the government”).

In any case, ultimately enough jurors were dismissed that I got called up, and then eventually made it into the set of 12 that were “the jury”. It was late enough in the process that I was only asked one or two questions before they moved on. With one last round of questions to fix the two alternates, we were set for the trial proper to start.

“A jury of your peers”

It’s a kind of set-phrase in the American legal system that someone accused of a crime is entitled to trial by “a jury of [their] peers”. Unsurprisingly, the reality is not quite that; what you get at the start is a random sampling of “adults registered as living in the county”, and from there you have a number of further limiting factors:

• The trial will be conducted in English, so anybody who doesn’t have a good command of English probably won’t be a great choice. This could easily rule out anybody deaf as well as non-native speakers.

• Which people have “hardships”? Sometimes it’s “oh, there’s a wedding I have to go to the week of the trial”, which could happen to anyone, but anyone with chronic hardship might find it hard to serve on a jury, whether that’s having children to take care of, or not being able to afford any missed days of work (even with the minor stipend you get for serving as a juror), or having a conflicting medical condition that can’t be accomodated.

• Personal experience with the topic of the case is not immediately disqualifying, but it did have both lawyers concerned about impartiality, and several potential jurors who admitted such experience were thanked and excused. Which on the one hand is fair, but it also means those perspectives wouldn’t be included in the final jury. (We did, in the end, have a few people with such connections; again, the lawyers can only strike 10 jurors each, and have a limited time to ask questions.)

• Similarly, strong feelings about the police were also not immediately disqualifying, but the judge asked whether potential jurors would be able to apply their skepticism to all witnesses. Some people said yes, some people said no. (Neither side spent much time on strong positive feelings about the police; in retrospect, I can see how that wasn’t so applicable with the way the case ended up playing out, but it easily could be in another trial.)

In the end, I don’t know if the twelve of us were who this particular defendant would describe as “peers”. We did have a mix of ages, genders, and ethnicities; the group was more white than San Francisco itself is, but not overwhelmingly so.

If there’s something that helps this, it’s that the judge made it very clear that the jury’s job is to decide what happened and if that violated the law. It’s not our job to choose the punishment (that’s the judge’s responsibility), and it’s not our job to make a moral judgment (that’s not part of the legal system at all, at least theoretically). And the judge asked very directly, “Are you comfortable with the idea of reaching a verdict without knowing the punishment?”. I was not comfortable, but I would do it.

EDIT: I meant that we weren’t making a moral judgment of the *defendant,* but a reader pointed out that there have been very important cases where the jury makes a moral judgment about the law and legal system. Sometimes Lawful and Good alignments come into conflict!

The “presumption of innocence”

Similar to “jury of peers”, Americans learn in grade school that in our legal system, a defendant is “presumed innocent”. The defense attorney explained that this didn’t just mean “baseline innocent”, but “as if your mom was accused of a crime you know she would never do”. This is admittedly a defense-biased explanation, but it did push on words I hadn’t really thought about. From one perspective, this was redundant with the rest of that phrase, “proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. But emotionally it felt like a very different thing, almost like being asked to not be impartial, so that the prosecution really would have to convince us despite that “presumption of innocence”. That’s the system we have, and I do want the “burden of proof” on the prosecution to be high; when working as described, that’s what keeps the government from sticking political enemies with weak charges to punish them.

*gestures pointedly at current federal government*

Given the time spent on this, I was surprised there wasn’t more emphasis on the difference between “not guilty” and “innocent”. “Not guilty” means the prosecution didn’t meet the requirement for “guilty”. It doesn’t have to mean a juror actually thinks the person is innocent! That’s not the question! It could mean

• I think the person didn’t do anything
• I think the person did something, but what they did didn’t break the law
• I think the person broke the law, but given the information we have there’s a reasonable possibility they didn’t

This ended up being relevant.

What we did have were a few other scenarios. The first set was a reminder that simply being charged of a crime is not evidence:

• If the prosecution doesn’t show up, obviously they haven’t shown us anything that makes us think the defendant is guilty, and so that’s Not Guilty.

• If the prosecution does a shitty job and the defense doesn’t show up, that’s still Not Guilty.

• The fact that this case got to trial is not evidence. This one was a little funny, since you’d think if the prosecution had nothing on hand they would not have bothered with all this time and effort, but, like, whatever they had we were going to see.

• The defendant choosing not to testify is not evidence. I and several others had no problem with this one—it’s too easy to see that a nervous defendant could be made to look bad by a skilled prosecutor, so much so that it’s a trope in TV law. But for some people it was a sticking point. *shrug*

And the second was a thought experiment: People v. Cat:

• Scenario 1: You put a cat and a mouse in a box together, close the box, and walk away. When you come back the mouse is nowhere to be seen. You can be pretty dang sure the cat ate the mouse right?

• Scenario 2: Same as above, but this time the box has a small hole in it. The cat looks pretty satisfied though. Still, it’s entirely reasonable the mouse got out through the hole, right? Therefore, Not Guilty.

• Scenario 3: Same as Scenario 2, but this time in addition to the hole, there’s a small spatter of blood. The cat looks satisfied. It seems pretty likely the cat ate the mouse. …But you can’t really say it’s unreasonable that the mouse could have escaped. The cat is still Not Guilty of murder—at most it is assault and battery, and even then it may not be “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

I think the defense attorney liked the thought experiment more than any of the jurors, but it certainly stuck in our minds. (I confess I couldn’t help thinking about Umineko no Naku Kori ni, which has a number of similar thought experiments.)

The trial

Once again our day started with waiting in the hall, but this time there were just 14 of us jurors. We mostly just gave each other polite nods and looked at our phones. One person had brought a laptop and was trying to get some other work done. The lawyers and the defendant, too, were in the hallway; the judge had been very clear that we must not talk to them or vice versa. (And the same for the judge themself! Off the record, the jurors are only allowed to talk to the court clerk.)

Soon we were called in, with the judge and the attorneys standing for us rather than us standing for the judge. One difference from TV! The judge gave us an initial set of instructions, and then the lawyers made their opening statements.

Hang on, Your Honor (this part was the same as TV), we don’t know anything about the case except that it’s related to <topic>. And you just said that opening and closing statements are not evidence, and we don’t have to believe any of it. Aren’t you going to tell us what the charges against the defendant are? The relevant laws? No? Okay then…

(None of us actually asked this out loud. Though it was not instructed explicitly, the jury was clearly not supposed to be participating at this point in the trial.)

So we got opening statements, and then the prosecution called their witnesses. Over the course of two days, we got statements from two of the police officers on the scene, a third to explain how some of their procedures and equipment worked, and an “expert witness” for other procedures and equipment. Unsurprisingly, none of them clearly remembered the events of the case, which happened months before the trial; the expert witness was most honest about it, regularly asking to “refresh their memory” by referring to the copy of their lab’s report that was in evidence.

The thing is, I can see how the system pushes things to happen this way. The judge was very clear that while evidence is put into the record, the lawyers are not allowed to explain any of it to us. There’s no section of the trial where the lawyer says “okay, I’m going to go over this document with you”; what’s said by the lawyer is not itself evidence. (Though you have to bend this a little when the lawyer says “Did XYZ happen?” and all the witness says is “yes”.) So instead the lawyer picks out the interesting parts of a document and has a relevant witness read them and explain them to us, the jury. The exception was audio/video recordings, which the lawyer could play for the whole courtroom and the witness just say “yes, that is a true and accurate depiction of events”. (And this case would have been very different without bodycam recordings from the police officers on the scene. I am glad to be in this new era.)

I noticed that the police officers, especially the more senior ones, addressed their answers to the jury, rather than to the lawyer asking the question. This definitely feels like a tactic; for me it backfired, in that it made the answer look more rehearsed (since it’s not what you’d naturally do answering someone’s question), but I can see how someone else might take it as acknowledgment, respect, or even just more human connection than otherwise. The expert witness had much less of this tendency, going back and forth between us and the attorney; nevertheless, they had also testified in several trials before, and their organization was associated with the police department, so they easily could have been practiced as well.

What was soon clear was that neither the prosecution nor the defense was interested in portraying “what actually happened”. This sounds like a criticism or flaw, but it really isn’t: in the absence of perfect information, what our legal system has decided to do is for the prosecution to stand up the strongest story they can and for the defense to poke holes in it. That means the prosecution might leave out information that they think will weaken their case, or the defense information that might strengthen the other side. The jury has to base their decision solely on what was said by the witnesses and admitted as evidence, and either it’s strong enough to eliminate all reasonable doubt or it isn’t.

I also hadn’t thought through the implications of that asymmetry. In TV trials, often the prosecution presents one story and the defense presents another, and the jury is choosing between them. But no, it really is “the prosecution presents a story, the defense pokes holes in it”, and the consequence of that for this trial was that the defense didn’t call a single witness. Instead, their closing argument was twice as long as the prosecution’s (though the prosecution gets one final rebuttal as well), and their approach was to shotgun through as many weak points in the prosecution’s argument as possible, noting that we could each have a different “reasonable doubt” that led us to Not Guilty.

As serious as the proceedings were, there were lighter moments as well, from the lawyers deliberately speaking casually to put both witnesses and the jury at ease, to an amusing turn of phrase from a witness, to the judge putting in a witty comment between proceedings. (“When the bailiff goes to fetch the next witness, it’s a great time to stretch and get a drink of water.”) Even the defendant smiled during some of these moments, though again, much more of their time was spent silent without being able to participate.

And really, while for us it was still a lot of active listening, at least it mattered. The defendant had no real influence on events at this point, and had to sit through several people watching and discussing a miserable moment in their life, caught on bodycam footage. As I already said, whatever the verdict ended up being, this was already a punishment.

Deliberation

(okay deliberation is still part of the trial, but I don’t know what to call the main part of the trial otherwise. heck, voir dire is probably part of the trial.)

With the closing arguments completed, the judge read us about eighteen pages of jury instructions, including, finally, the actual relevant laws in the case. I can’t say anything was irrelevant, but 18 pages is too many; even though the judge managed to keep from a monotone, it was clearly still something being read off rather than designed to engage. Would slides have been better? A set of bullet points for us to follow along with as they read? Or just keeping things shorter? I don’t know. Law is difficult and you don’t want it to be different in every trial, but also we are just normal people and there’s a reason we didn’t go into law.

(It has been clear throughout that the judge, attorneys, and presumably court clerk all—obviously—have a technical legal understanding of proceedings gained from their years of study and experience, and have to translate all that into something normal enough for us plebs. Which sometimes loses precision.)

Instructions received, we left the courtroom…through the usual entrance, rather than the conspicuous door in the back like on TV. Huh. Oh well, no matter. The bailiff then guided us into the back hallways to a smallish room with a conference table, a blackboard, a whiteboard, a posterboard, and water and bathrooms. If we wanted a break, we weren’t to leave on our own; we needed to be escorted out by the bailiff. If anyone was taking a break inside the room (say, to use the bathroom), the rest of us were supposed to stop deliberating and wait for all 12 of us to be ready again.

This was the first time most of us had really talked to each other. We went around the table and did names for the first time, and after some short initial discussion we did an early closed vote. If we had all agreed here, we could have reported it to the bailiff and gone home the same day. But we didn’t.

Thus our discussions started in earnest. For the rest of that day and the entirety of the next day (but with the usual lunch break), we went over how each of us were thinking, what was and wasn’t convincing, what was in some of the evidence in record that the attorneys hadn’t focused on. Here’s where the “adversarial” nature of the trial came back to bite us: the information we wanted was either not presented at all, or was technically in a document in evidence but too opaque for us to make heads or tails of. Neither the prosecution nor the defense had chosen to expand on these areas, and so we were left to work with what we did have. In this case, I think the defense’s “shotgun” approach ended up not working very well; rather than instilling many kinds of doubt, it meant the one bit of doubt the room generally did have hadn’t gotten enough attention.

I hadn’t known how much the word “reasonable” was going to matter for deliberations. The instructions were clear that the prosecution didn’t have to eliminate all possible doubt; if that were the case, no one could ever be convicted, because there’s pretty much always some hypothetical scenario that would make the defendant innocent [sic]. But while the word was usually paired up as “reasonable doubt”, there were a few other instructions that included “reasonable conclusions”, reminding me that the operative word was “reasonable”. Were the alternate scenarios in my mind reasonable or unreasonable?

We did, in fact, decide to ask the judge if there was any additional guidance around “reasonable doubt”; in order for the jury to communicate with the judge, we had to write our questions down and send them into the courtroom with the bailiff, for the judge to (presumably) read aloud into the court record along with the answers sent back. In this case, we did not get any such guidance, just the portion of the jury instructions to reference. Which I guess makes sense: the judge should not be seen as influencing the jury one way or another.

In my case, one minor thing I had to get past was the word “prove”, which I am used to in a mathematical sense. You can’t, in math, “prove” something merely “beyond a reasonable doubt” and call it proven (though I suppose “probabilistic proofs” demonstrate that even mathematical proofs are not always true all the time). This didn’t really impede my understanding of the task at hand; it was more a minor annoyance, another case where legal language and my own idiolect didn’t match up. I focused on “reasonable conclusion” instead.

And in the end, the views and experiences of my fellow jury members (we did double-check that the jury instructions allowed for referencing personal experiences!) did end up swaying my vote, not because it significantly changed my understanding of events, but because it changed my evaluation of which alternatives were “reasonable”. This felt like a very subtle thing to base a verdict on, but that’s the job! And yet, by the end of the second day, the jury as a whole still did not have unanimous agreement, a requirement for a verdict in criminal court. With about 10 minutes left in the day, we had the bailiff relay that to the judge, and they came back with the message “see you on Monday”.

We all left a little frustrated, but as one member put it, we’re spending this much time deliberating (nearly as long as the lawyers’ statements and examination of witnesses) because we all want to do the right thing. We’re taking it seriously. And though I had disagreements with other jurors, or thought that they were misunderstanding something from the evidence, I did also think that most if not all of us were in fact committing to doing a good job—definitely a quality you’d want from “a jury of your peers”. Though the matters were serious, the mood for the day hadn’t been fully somber, and we were all much friendlier with each other than the day before, when we had just been strangers.

Over the weekend I tried not to think about the case much. I didn’t want to come in with opinions more solidly entrenched, or a dissertation about something that maybe nobody else cared about. But when we got back on Monday, we had only just started discussing things (nobody having shifted their opinion much over the weekend) when the judge called us into the courtroom—this time through the TV jury door. In retrospect, perhaps we could have done this the week before if we had reached the conclusion half an hour earlier.

Once we were all seated, the judge noted everyone in attendance, as they had in the previous week. The defendant wasn’t there today, but both attorneys were. Our elected foreperson was then asked to state on record that the jury was “hopelessly deadlocked”, and the other 11 of us asked to confirm that. And it is possible that I am misremembering the order of events here, but I believe the judge asked first for the ratio of votes, then formally declared a “mistrial”, and only after that asked which way the ratio went. They impressed upon us that this was a valid outcome and that we should not feel negatively about ending with a deadlocked vote—this is an expected outcome with 12 jurors and a requirement of unanimity. And with that, our jury service was over, and we were exempt from further service for one year.

(Hey, the people who got dismissed the first day were also exempt for one year. Shouldn’t participating in a trial exempt us for longer? Though at least it was a relatively short trial.)

Afterwards

Surprisingly, that wasn’t quite the end of it; the judge mentioned that the attorneys would be out in the hallway shortly to ask us questions. I didn’t know that was a thing! And it felt a little weird, given that the case would presumably be retried in the future. Even so, most of us ended up sticking around, standing in a circle in the hallway with both attorneys (who seemed at least a bit friendly with each other, even, not merely polite). We tossed out things that did and didn’t work and asked questions about missing information. (At least some of it is “it’s actually kind of hard to get witnesses to come in for a trial they’re not directly involved in” and “data is not retained for months after an incident unless you know right away it’s going to be needed”.) And then we went our separate ways.

We didn’t reach a verdict, and the defendant is therefore still in limbo. Their story isn’t over, only my participation in it. And San Francisco’s a big city, so it’s unlikely I’ll see anyone involved again. It was, in the end, an Experience.

This entry was posted on July 04, 2026 and is filed under Personal.