I’ve been on jury service for the past fortnight, and have drawn one case for the full two weeks. As I write this, we’re still deliberating. I am prohibited from filling you in with the details, and such is the seriousness with which I and the other jurors treat our task, I’m certainly not tempted to supply you with any.

So, that’s it then. Nothing to say, move along now.
Except for the fact that it’s been one of the most humbling and profound experiences of my life, and an emotional rollercoaster to boot.
To start with, randomness is a trip. A group of people brought together with nothing linking them, except having their name on the electoral roll in a particular area, is about as random as one can get. To experience random selection in a world city like London is to get a visceral sense of the diversity of the city’s inhabitants at maximum degrees of separation, in class, education, wealth, race and nationality. Our jury could not be more mixed. And in the face of such diversity, all that is visible is what we have in common: a commitment to do something properly, and that lovely subtle and kind sense of humour that flickers across people’s eyes and body language sometimes.
I marvel at the structure of the jury system, the strength and beauty of it, like fine architecture. Ordinary people are dragged away from our lives and given a strong challenge, based on the assumption, the expectation, the compliment, the confidence that we will do our best to meet it, to the best of our ability. When you seek the best in people, we tend to rise to it.
For the first few days, with absolutely nothing in common, people revert to a civil sobriety, insulated from each other with books and newspapers. We’ve been inoculated against complaining about the waiting, because we’ve been warned a dozen times in the literature and on posters on the wall and by the ushers, that waiting is what we’ve got to expect. Everyone is patient and polite to a fault. The only other time I’ve experienced such silent compliance is in the clap clinic, where shame, not duty, is the dampener.
Apart from the superb film/play Twelve Angry Men, the experience of being in a jury is hardly ever touched on in the media. The confidentiality requirement no doubt contributes a great deal to this. In popular drama, it is easier to portray trials from the perspective of an individual – the prosecutor/police/defence barrister/judge – rather than to try and pin down the extraordinarily subtle shifts of mood and thought in a group of strangers thrown together and hermetically sealed until consensus is reached.
When was the last time you saw consensus as the peak moment of a drama? It’s not sexy. On the outside. On the inside, of course, it’s a hotbed of passion and intensity, and when – and if – our jury reaches consensus, I expect it will be quite emotional for us all.
I was not prepared for quite how important the jury is in a trial – as the judge said to us in his summing up, there are thirteen judges in a case, him and us. And, as people with absolutely no connection to any party in the case, and no legal training, the evidence is presented to us with painstaking thoroughness. To cap it all, the judge repeats everything at the end for us and tells us about the law concerned. And then we decide whether someone should go to jail or not.
The placing of ordinariness at the heart of a mighty institution such as the legal system is an extraordinary thing. Most other organisations have, at the top, an elite, around which a mystique develops which perpetuates and/or magnifies its power. And which can sometimes lead to distortion and corruption.
To keep the power of judging criminality non-toxic and impersonal, it’s spread around and anonymised in juries. But it’s no less heady when experienced.
To the extent to which I felt powerless at the beginning of this fortnight, my life and work disrupted by a computer lottery, and to the extent to which I felt angry and resentful, stuck in my uncomfortable seat listening to the drone of self-important barristers repeating themselves, hour by hour, day by day, seemingly to maximise their income – that is the extent to which I now feel powerful, now that we’re deciding the verdict on our fellow citizen. The wheel has turned full circle.
Some things in life are very right.