One of the things that struck me as a juror was that the court did not respect my time. Jurors’ time was not seen as a valuable commodity and was frequently wasted. During the two weeks I saw two trials each of which lasted two days. I had to present myself to the court each day, and on a few occasions was sent home immediately, since I was not required for a trial that day. This wasted the time I spent traveling to the court.

Even when there was a trial on, there was a lot of sitting around waiting. One of the trials was for shoplifting and we had to wait outside the courtroom for over an hour while a videotape machine was set up in the court so that we could view the video evidence. The courtrooms should have been set up permanently for the showing of video evidence (which is presumably fairly common). The trial was in a new (less than ten year old) courthouse, so there was no excuse for not having the facilities to present evidence quickly.

In one of the trials the barrister for the defence was clearly winging it and the jury’s time was wasted as he consulted the solicitor (who was very well prepared). Even when the barrister is well prepared the solicitor/barrister split we have in England results in jury time being wasted.

It seems to me that there is a lot of scope for better time management by the court administrators. The court days could also be made longer, so that a juror could take fewer days off work for a given number of court hours.

Using jurors’ time more efficiently won’t solve the problem of lack of jurors, but it will reduce that problem. If trials were run more efficiently so that more of them could be completed in 5 days, then more jurors would be covered by CT’s 5 day jury duty pay. And if courts didn’t waste so much of jurors’ valuable time, then those jurors would be less angry that their time was being wasted.