I think that it is very unlikely that any of the six jury members will ever read this blog. Of the jury pool of 36 who came into the room, only one knew that my lawyer was a County Commissioner, and that exception was another lawyer. I was amazed and a bit appalled by that factoid, but it made it easier to select a jury.
If I were to be publicly critical of the jury that we ended up with, the judge would slap me down in a heartbeat. That probably wouldn't stop me if criticism were justified, as readers of this blog doubtless know.
While I won some and lost some with the jury, I thought that they were everything that one could ask for in a jury. They were completely attentive and took notes. They had written questions that were germane to the issues at hand. I do wish that they had stuck around after the trial to answer questions, but they didn't.
In one way the Judge messed them over, and this is the only criticism of Senior Judge David Parrish that I will make. Otherwise, he ran his courtroom exactly the way I would expect.
Several times during the trial, Judge Parrish assured the jurors that they need not hurry to ask questions of the major participants because they would be present throughout the trial. Then, without notice to the jury, both sides rested at the end of the second day. The next morning the jury came in with several pages of written questions which couldn't have been asked because the trial was over except for instructions and deliberations.
Compounding what the judge did to mislead the jurors as to their opportunity to ask questions was a perceptible attitude that they should have known that once both sides rested, the trial was over. If I were a juror, I wouldn't have been happy that I tried to do the best job I could and the system got in the way.
It is disheartening to have spent $60,000 and eight years to get a lawsuit to trial and have it end in a situation where the jurors had pages of questions that they were tricked into being unable to ask. It doesn't speak well for the system.
No juror who reads what I write should think I have even the mildest criticism for him, her, or for the jury as a whole. I don't think I could have asked for better jurors. I could have asked for a different outcome, but the outcome I got was quite reasonable given the evidence they were and were not presented.
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