Search for “jury service” online and you will soon stumble across ways to get out of doing jury service. These aren’t always the most practical or legal: unless you’re prepared to fake a pregnancy, book an impromptu cruise or stick two pencils up your nose, Blackadder style, and say “wibble” a lot, you’re probably going to have to do jury service.
This is a good thing. Jury service can be a disruptive, inconvenient pain in the neck, but it’s also a vital public service and one of the cornerstones of our ... (all right, Dad, cut out the lecture). But here’s another reason why doing jury service is a good thing: it could turn out to be one of the most fascinating and rewarding experiences of your life.
I didn’t anticipate this. The court letter telling me I was being summoned for jury service was the first thing I opened when I got home from hospital with my newborn daughter (my actual baby, not one I had borrowed from the hospital in the hope of getting out of jury service, although, thinking about it now, that’s not the worst idea). In the state I was in at that moment, it was hard to care or even process what the letter was saying. It could have announced that I had won bronze in this year’s Latvian jelly sculpture awards, or informed me that I was being summoned for execution by the holographic overlords of the planet Quargum, and I would still probably have tossed it underneath some electricity bills and gone off to work out how to clean milky sick off the sofa.
But eventually my brain regained some kind of coherence and, on a Monday morning about two months later, I found myself arriving at court, as nervous as I was curious. Courts are serious and intimidating places, and probably seem even more serious and intimidating if you speak to pop musicians for a living. They’re also the kind of places that invite you to invent stories about the people you see huddled outside – who are they, how did they end up here? This isn’t ideal. Your job as a juror is largely to avoid doing this, at least when you’re sitting on a jury. You are urged to keep an open mind. And, if you do so, you will find a whole list of prejudices you never knew you had come crashing down with each passing day.
This was especially the case, at least for me, in terms of all the jurors I met during the two weeks. In 2016, we seem to have accepted the notion that the UK is divided, the Brexit vote a perfect emblem of a country where one half barely recognises the other, let alone goes out drinking with them on a Friday night; a place where old and young, rich and poor, are all pitted against each other. What’s more, we’ve become adept at reinforcing our differences by constructing personal online bubbles – reading news that fits our opinions and connecting with people who share similar interests.
Believe me, there’s nothing like a stint on a jury to cut through all that – you are thrown together with people from all walks of life. In the space of two weeks, I got to know builders, entrepreneurs, football referees, cooks, NHS workers, butlers and IT consultants. The jury on which I served was a mix of age, gender, race, religions, backgrounds ... you would almost think, having read the news over the past year or so, that we would be unable to communicate. And yet not only did we complete our task with dedication, but we also got along famously. When our case was over, we even went to the pub together. I felt sad that we would probably never see each other again.
I’m forbidden by law from telling you any juicy details of the case (spoiler: not actually that juicy) or revealing any of the fascinating stories that jurors shared about their lives. I especially can’t tell you about my heartfelt and moving speech that convinced the entire jury to change their decision at the last minute, although that’s mainly because it didn’t happen (other than in my head, every morning, on the way in).
For those reasons, I realise that this column may lack drama. I accept that 12 Reasonable Men and Women Who Respected Each Other’s Opinions and Got Along Nicely would not make for a particularly interesting sequel, not even if it focused on the dramatic scene during deliberations where I ate so many jelly sweets that I got a headache. But the experience did more for me than fulfil my sense of civic duty – it re-established my faith in humanity and gave me a small flicker of hope that, actually, we all might just be able to get along in future.
