24 Wild Jury Duty Stories

21.

“I served on a jury once with the strangest older woman sitting next to me the whole time. She was seriously terrible. She spent most of the trial writing emails on her iPad, doing the crossword puzzle, or sleeping. When she wasn’t doing any of that, she was interrupting the testimony to ask people to ‘speak up,’ ask clarifying questions, make side comments to the other jurors, or to tell the attorneys or even the judge that she thought they weren’t supposed to do something based on her misunderstanding of the pre-trial instructions. Her to judge: ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to consider such-and-such testimony?’ Judge: ‘If something comes up and I don’t want you to consider it, I’ll tell you. Now, shut the hell up.'”

“The best part was, once we got into deliberations, she had the audacity to volunteer herself as the foreperson. Every single one of us gave her the biggest side-eye ever, until finally, one woman managed to break through her shock to say, ‘I think I’d prefer it if you weren’t our foreperson.’ We immediately elected that woman as our foreperson.

The older woman also held up our deliberations with rambling anecdotes that had no relevance and a consistent misunderstanding of the legal statutes that we were debating. I still have no idea how she made it on to that jury, but she was genuinely trying to do a good job (when she felt like paying attention).”

—u/CapnCrunchHarkness

Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahdobro/wildest-jury-duty-stories