Yeah, I did jury service two or three years back - sat on two trials in the two week period, both sexual assault, unfortunately. I was foreman on the second week (got to deliver a guilty verdict), in a jury more or less identical to the first one.
Jury service was one of the few times in my life I actually felt a part of the community, or, rather, the larger, more complicated machinery of a large population group.
It was also fascinating on two counts; firstly, to see how the legal/court system works up close, day to day, and secondly, from a behavioural psychology angle - seeing how people of all age groups (well, 19 to around the max age for service) related to one another and acted as individuals in a room full of, at first, strangers (before everyone's briefed and before anyone's called in to be picked/not picked).
Some resented having to do it, some didn't even know they could be called, some came from just over the road, and others came from other cities a good while away. Most of the people who groused about it on day1 said they'd like to do it again, if called, so the experience proved rewarding for many people.
And of course, seeing how your 11 fellow jurors acted in the deliberation room was fascinating. Who would speak up (a few mostly kept silent, annoyingly), who had really followed the intricacies of the trial's timeline and evidence, who allowed their biases to cloud their judgement (only one older woman in the second trial did, and I had to confront her very directly, in the end, to make something clear to her about what was really being discussed in the trial, i.e. it wasn't about pointless subjective moral judgement), and so on.
Jury systems are strange beasts. It's odd to sit in the court room surrounded by people who've spent most of their lives training to work within that very room, and yet the whole thing hinges on, typically, 12 legal noobs who've never had to think about a trial beyond a film, book, or an article in the news. I sometimes felt saying 'Wait, you want us to decide guilt or innocent?! You're the experts here, not us... '
Also, generally when people think of guilt and innocence, they feel that grand ideas of right and wrong are being served. But that's not the case; trials aren't about that at all, they're simply a process of justice - as fair as it can be - playing out. In the first week's trial there was plenty of 'that's wrong/he's wrong', but none of that mattered or was ultimately relevant, given everything hinges on the evidence. That was an interesting distinction, and one I'd never really thought about before starting jury service. At the end of the first week I hadn't felt 'justice' was served in terms of right or wrong, but the process of law had played out, arguably in the only way it could've done given the evidence at hand.
So yeah, I found it a fascinating and rewarding experience, all in all. I'm glad I never got placed on a trial that stretched into weeks or months, however, as that would be a practical nuisance after a while, and potentially rather stressful if it was a particularly unpleasant case.
