Deliberations, day 2

We arrived to a box of 2 dozen Danish from the bailiff assigned to us. “Make it a good day,” said the sticky note on top. Great. Twelve people, high anxiety and 24 Danish. I had been doing pretty well with my newly-diagnosed type-2 diabetes -- I had steered clear of temptation for over a month. This did not bode well for my blood sugar… But, my, were they good.

We had no access to transcripts of the testimony. We could, and did, ask the court reporter to read back sections to us, a task she clearly did not relish. She read extremely fast and seemed to forget what she was actually doing. The identifying “question” and “answer” tags soon got misplaced, and it came out like this:

“Yes. Question.”
“What did you see then? Answer.”
“Nothing. It was dark. Question.”

She reacted impatiently to a request to slow down, and it seemed that hearing the re-reading took more focus than the original testimony.

We asked for the presence of the Big Red Dog, described previously.

When we left, close to 6 pm, we found the lead detective and Alan Simon and several others waiting down the hallway from the jury room. We hurried past them, and left the building. As I waited to cross the street in front of the courthouse, an over-sized pickup was waiting at the light. Mexican music blared from the cab, and a long flowered couch occupied the bed. Looking at the driver and his passenger I thought, “I’ll bet there’s a pretty good chance those folks have not been dealing with issues of life and death all day. Boy, do I envy them.”