The man at the other end of the table closed his laptop and thrust it into its case.

“Colossal waste of time,” he muttered.

The rest of us looked up in amusement. We all felt it, too, but there were rules in the Quiet Room. One of them, apparently, was no muttering.

But the long day was over. We’d been dismissed. We stood, stretched, packed our books and snacks, tucked our stale foam chairs under the massive government-issue tables, and stepped out into the marble hallway of that palace of justice, the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse in downtown Baltimore.

Just another day of jury duty.

It had been years since I’d been called up, maybe because the last time was such a doozie: a sexual assault trial that lasted three days. I was the foreman of the jury, a job with awesome responsibility and absolutely no power. It was clear to all of us jurors that the defendant was guilty of something. His guilt was palpable; most of the lawyering, on both sides of the case, had something to do with other aspects of the man’s unsavory past, and whether or not those facts could enter into the current trial.

Alas, the testimony from the only expert witness, an emergency room physician, was inconclusive. Although you wouldn’t have guessed as much from the triumphal way the prosecution thanked him when he got down from the witness stand.

The lawyers were young and somewhat inexperienced. Neither side made a particularly compelling case. When it came time for the jury to deliberate, we all felt more or less the same way: the defendant was probably guilty, but the prosecutors hadn’t done their job of proving the very serious charges against him beyond a reasonable doubt.

The dissonance of feeling that the defendant was a bad guy, but not having the freedom to find him guilty, was difficult for all of us, but for one juror in particular, a self-righteous young man who held out against the rest of us hour after hour. His argument amounted to, “We can’t just let a guilty man go free!”

Each of the other jurors explained their reasoning, but it was finally up to me to persuade this one holdout, based on all the evidence, the relevant law, and the instructions we’d been given, that the prosecutors simply hadn’t made their case.

“I know!’ he moaned. “It’s just…he’s guilty!”

In the end, we returned our unanimous verdict: not guilty. After the courtroom was cleared, and the judge was thanking us for our service, I spoke out on behalf of my fellow jurors: had we done the right thing?

The judge smiled and said he understood our difficulty. There were lots of things we hadn’t been told about the defendant that might have swayed us. But he agreed that the case, as presented, was weak, and said that he probably would have done the same thing if he were in our shoes.

I went home that evening with a migraine from all the strenuous arguing, but also with a feeling of pride. I’d always thought of jury duty as something to be avoided. I’d literally groaned with annoyance when the summons arrived in the mail; but now I saw it in a different light: as a kind of sacred civic duty. With great thought and deliberation, we’d sat in judgment over a fellow citizen. It had been frustrating. We’d been forced to set a guilty-seeming man free. But justice had also, strangely, been served; the law had been respected.

Of course, not every summons leads to a dramatic trial, or even a dramatic insight. Case in point, my jury duty this week, which amounted to sitting for an entire work day in a stuffy room with a wheezing Pepsi vending machine in the corner and Hollywood movies playing silently on the big flat screen TV (this was the quiet room, remember?). The Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse, with its airport-style security at the door, its sour institutional furniture, and a legion of suspicious sheriff’s deputies roaming the halls, seemed as much a prison as any jailhouse.

As the afternoon progressed, those of us with high juror numbers watched with secret relief as those with lower numbers were called up to courtrooms for voir dire.

Then came the moment we’d been waiting for: a dignified woman opened the door of the quiet room, and announced, in the soft tones of a kindergarten teacher waking her little charges from their naps, that we were dismissed.

The man with the laptop leaped out of his chair, muttering about the colossal waste of time.

The rest of us smiled knowingly at each other. Our service was done, at least for this year. We’d dodged the bullet of a lengthy and inconvenient trial.

I felt like telling him that our day hadn’t really been wasted; that most of the time, the mere threat of a jury trial was enough to compel a plea bargain; that he should feel honored to have participated, even in such a passive and boring fashion, in an institution of justice that linked us directly with the ancient Greeks and the very first stirrings of democracy.

But I kept my mouth shut. He was entitled to his opinion. No doubt he felt — as we all do — that his time was valuable. In fact, his face was rigid with anger.

I knew I was right. Even so, I doubted I could make the case.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 17 May 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com