Is the lunch nice? Do you get paid as well? What kind of hotels are you all kept in? Is it like in those Hollywood films? How common are things like jury tempering? Do you all have sufficient protection?
I served on a jury fairly recently, and it was a much more mundane thing than anything you'd see in a Hollywood film. Whole thing took 10 hours start to finish. Got picked from the pool, had the case presented by the prosecutor, heard witness testimony, the defense attorney made his case mostly by questioning the prosecution's witnesses, closing statements, deliberated very briefly (it was not a complex case) and delivered the verdict and went home. We were paid about $40 for the day plus travel mileage, and lunch was ordered off a menu and delivered to our deliberation room, presumably from the courthouse cafeteria. The food was actually pretty good.
The high-profile cases like SBF's are a tiny fraction of jury trials in the US, most trials have no significant risk of jury tampering and the jury is not sequestered, meaning that if we had needed more time for deliberation, we would have just gone home for the evening and shown up at the courthouse the next day. We did have our phones collected at the start of the day and returned at the end, which seemed like a reasonable precaution against both "independent research" and distractions/interruptions, and would have also made jury tampering somewhat more difficult if anyone was so inclined.
You were in the jury pool for a week. You could serve on multiple cases if they were short enough. If you were picked for a case and it went on over a week you got paid. Some trials require a hotel stay but the chances of getting on one is rare.
The lunches were sandwiches from the vending machine. Two choice ham and without meat. They were good I can taste the salt on the ham as I write this.
The conversations within the jury are like tv. Immediately you have a few who think anyone on trial is guilty. You have a smaller group who want to find reasons they may not. At some point someone will accuse that group of being part of the criminal conspiracy. Friends and enemies are formed. Promises and deals were made but all disappears after the verdict (someone offered me a job and ghosted later).
Protections? I had a job offer to start that week that I lost because I couldn't start. No police protections.
The actual trial is very boring. Police reading notes. Long winded questions without any tv drama.
Oh yeah, I watched an episode or two of that. Of course, it's not actual jury duty — it's all fake. I assumed that food was provided because that keeps them all together, for filming purposes. When I served, people split up at lunchtime and went to various different restaurants.
Yea I think it depends on which county you're in and the case as well. These guys had their hotels paid for by the end of it because they had to be sequestered.
