All Rise for the Jury

Everyone’s least favorite piece of mail is a jury summons.  So when I received a summons from the US District Court of Massachusetts, I was pissed (especially since I was a juror on a Middlesex County case in the past year). When I actually got selected to serve as juror on a criminal trial, I was seething! But my attitude changed as I participated in our beautiful, democratic and effective judicial system over the next two weeks. An orthopedic doctor was accused of 11 counts of health care fraud.  The federal prosecution lawyers were smart, smooth and poised.  The defendant’s lawyers were not.  There were 22 witnesses including an undercover, special FBI agent - so cool! There were thousands of pages of testimony, charts, spreadsheets, books on healthcare coding, doctors’ notes, etc.that didn’t make the jurors’ job easy.  While I thought the 11 verdicts would not take long to unanimously agree upon, I was very wrong.  I learned so much about human nature while I sat with 11 strangers over four days deciding a doctor’s fate.  Despite emotions clouding judgment, despite anti-government biases and despite the inability to look at patterns/trends, we the jurors found the defendant guilty of 10 of the 11 counts.  Lesson learned:  Look at a jury summons as an opportunity, a ticket to participate in the best justice system on earth.