Jury service: Does it need an audit/supervisor?

Did you listen to the directions as to the confidentiality of the jury room? Should the 3 of us who were able to do their duty not be reduced to 2?

Would a supervisor help?

The role you're thinking of is called a facilitator. I've seen them in action as part of management training. He or she invariably leads the team in a certain direction so the end result is what the facilitator wanted but the team think they have independently come to the decision they reached.

So, in the context of a jury, it would not be a good idea. You'd be putting twelve ordinary men and women in the hands of a professionally trained manuipulator.

The OP said: I served Jury duty this year

It could have been a trial in the CCC or it could have been in the Circuit Court in Tralee. It could even have been a defamation case with a jury, we know literally nothing about the case.

If what you are suggesting is correct, the OP's post could be used in attempts to overturn every guilty verdict returned by juries in every criminal trial that happened since Jan. 1st last.

We'd be getting into very dangerous territory if an anonymous post on the internet containing no details of the case or where the trial took place was capable of adversely affecting the administration of justice.

You are discussing what happened in the jury room. You will have been warned not to do so. I am amazed that you were allowed sit on the jury at all. The defence must have been out of challenges.

The defence would have seen him when he was being called for service and would have some details about him before the jury deliberations began. A trained defence lawyer should be able to spot a trouble-maker immediately.

Hard to know who would likely share info afterwards though. I was on jury service (and selected) this year, and there were a lot of people rejected by both sides for ostensibly no reason so perhaps it's above my pay grade lol

Yes this is something I observed, luckily in my jury service there was a plurality of actual jurors and only 1-2 not actively taking part correctly like you describe. I shudder to think what could happen if it were the other way round

Take 12 random people off the street and it seems reasonable to me that

a) 4 or 5 will diligently listen to both sides with an open mind.
b) 2 or 3 will fixate on one or two pieces of evidence and not be open to considering anything else.
c) 1 or 2 will decide to go with their 'superior gut instinct'.
d) 1 will just go with the majority to get it over and done with.

Ideally you'd want more from 'column a', but it probably wouldn't be a representative sample of your peers then. I don't believe the system necessarily considers 'b' and 'c' to be bad jurors per se. 'd' is clearly a waste of space.

People, or men?

As a veteran of a two-month jury trial myself, it does have a supervisor, the judge.

After that, each juror's opinion is as valid as anothers'. The deliberation process is to tease out evidence and to relate it back to the judge's charge. If it is the case that certain juror's have, for whatever reason, a prejudiced view that isn't backed up by the evidence in the trial, then the duty of the others is to offer a majority verdict, or that a verdict cannot be reached and the case should be re-tried before a new jury at a later date.

There's always one 🤨

But what was it about the behaviour of these 75% that made them entirely unfit to serve as a juror?

They may not have followed a process that appeared logical to you, or they may simply not have communicated it to you, but that doesn’t mean that they arrived at an incorrect outcome.

What was the outcome out of interest?