Everyone tells you how boring jury duty is. People feel sorry for you  when you tell them that you are on a trial. "Oh," they say with pity. "You poor thing."

But no one tells you how emotionally involving a trial can be. No one tells you about the surrogate family you form with your fellow jurors as you spend day after day together in a small room. Most of all, no one tells you how incredibly serious it is to decide another person’s fate.

Well, I’m here to tell the tale. While I’m still processing the events of the last few days, I will try to share with you some of the details of my experience. 

Monique, the Court Officer, told us on Tuesday that we might go into deliberations on Wednesday and she was right. The lawyers presented closing arguments in the morning and then the judge gave us his general procedural instructions about deliberations and specifics about the legal issues pertaining to this trial.

Before we went into the courtroom, Monique took our lunch orders because we were being sequestered during lunch. She told us to be very specific about what we wanted. When we got back from the courtroom, there were white paper bags with our numbers on it.

Monique had promised us chips and none arrived. "There are no chips," one of the jurors cried sounding quite upset. "I’m sorry," Monique said. "They usually send chips."

But there was nothing she could do.

We decided before beginning to deliberate, to eat lunch and let the smokers smoke outside (under supervision of a court officer). We were not allowed to discuss anything unless everyone was in the room. If someone was in the bathroom, we couldn’t speak about the trial. If a court officer was in the room: mum’s the word.

The judge asked that the alternates stay on until the verdict, but they were not allowed to listen to our deliberations and had to go into a separate room. 

Once deliberations began, things got very loud and contentious. Dad suggested we speak one at a time and listen to one another with respect.

That turned out to be easier said than done.

I wrote the words: "Quiet Please" on a napkin and pinned it to a bulletin board. Finally, the group let me call on people in an orderly fashion. I made people raise their hands and told them to stop when they interupted one another. That would work for a few minutes until people started shouting again.

Despite the noise level, it turned out that the group was unanimous about some major points. We all agreed that the prosecution’s evidence did not prove their case against the defendant, a hospital police officer who was accused of sexually abusing a minor in her hospital room.

We all came to the conclusion independently that the prosecution’s case didn’t hold water and that the testimony of the girl was, to say the least, extremely fuzzy; we easily agreed to throw out much of her testimony. We all believed that while something may have gone on in that girl’s hospital room, there just wasn’t the evidence to prove it.

So in an orderly fashion, we got rid of the first four counts against the defendent: NOT GUILTY. NOT GUILTY. NOT GUILTY. NOT GUILTY.

There was, however, one point that the evidence proved: the police officer had indeed endangered the welfare of a child. The wording of that particular count was so broad that it was nearly impossible NOT to convict him.

On this point, however, there was some confusion. We sent the judge a note asking that he explain to us once again the meaning of "endangering the welfare of a child."

As a group, we marched into the courtroom and listened to the judge, a smart, good natured man, explain it again. After that, we voted and two people still weren’t sure. A lengthy discussion enused. The fact that two people were uncertain, really forced the rest of us to articulate and clarify our position. Eventually, everyone came to believe that the defendant had indeed endangered the welfare of a child according to the wording of the law.

Quite simply, we could not escape the fact that the defendent was a 25 year old hospital police officer who had acted in an inappropriate and illegal manner toward a minor in a hospital pediatric ward.

When we finally all agreed that the defendant was guilty on that one count, the jury forman gave Monique a note that said: "We have reached a verdict" and we were eventually called to the courtroom.

This is when things got hard. From the jury box, I could see the defendant’s mother, sisters, and pregnant wife sitting behind him crying and praying. I knew what we were going to say would please them to some extent. But it was not the aquittal that the defense had wanted. We still had to convict him on that one count.

The women looked relieved as the foreman declared Not Guilty four times for each of the first four counts. The defendant’s mother held her hands in prayer and looked toward the ceiling. But when the foreman said Guilty to that fifth count, a misdemeanor, they all started sobbing.

It was heart wrenching. In the jury room we’d all been able to put aside our sympathies and our emotional feelings about the two parties. We had acted seriously and responsibly; we had done our job.

But here in the courtroom, there was no denying the sadness of the situation.

This was real life. Right or wrong, this young man was not going to be aquitted on that one count because the evidence proved that he had, in fact, endangered the welfare of a child.

While the defendent was aquitted of some of the other more serious sexual counts, that fact didn’t seem to console the sorrow of the women sitting behind him.

And that was hard to bear. No one tells you that the verdict sits like a rock in your stomach as you attempt to go about your life in the hours after the trial.

The faces of everyone connected with the trail are lingering in my mind. Even as I try to reconnect with my own life, my family, these faces are in my head and heart.

That’s what happens. Being a juror is a serious job. But someone’s got to do it.

  *To read about who was on the jury. Go to the next post: POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE: Who were we?