When I first got an Ontario jury duty survey in late 2024, it jolted this reporter’s sense of curiosity to learn much more about a system I have watched often as a passive observer and on seldom occasions for journalistic purposes without thinking the call to perform one of the most important civic duties a citizen can do would actually happen.
Months after responding to that initial survey with all of my current life details, a subsequent summons to appear in an Ontario court house for jury duty, and mere minutes after a two-week criminal trial ended and the jury was discharged, I found myself barely able to speak through a rush of tears at the bottom of an extended, proverbial roller coaster of emotions.
To a neutral and non-experienced observer, the reaction likely wouldn’t make sense. To someone whose career is in the justice sector, this description might leave them puzzled. To someone who served as a juror and based on the limited accounts I could find ahead of time before this experience, the reaction could potentially be understandable.
I won’t share the particulars of the case I was involved in since it’s still finishing at an Ontario court, but it involved multiple criminal charges. However, let’s first go back and generally look at how the process unfolded after I arrived at the court house on my summons date.
According to the summons I received, potential jurors were required to be available for up to five days and be present at the court house by 8:30 a.m. on the first day. The line was out the door, through the forecourt and down the front sidewalk. There had to be at least a couple of hundred jurors present. Like every day that followed, airport-style security screening takes place (and as I saw a few different times, that means dull dinner knives to go with your meal will be tossed).
On day one, you report to a designated lounge for check-in before watching a public service video on Ontario jury duty (which came with an apology about references to the former Queen and a promise that an updated version referencing the King is coming). Many sat through so focused on their phones or computers, or in some cases trying to squeeze in a nap. Roughly two-and-a-half hours later, our group (referred to as a jury panel) were ushered to a courtroom for the first trial of the day.
Sitting with several dozen others in the public gallery, you await the judge and they will give you a brief explanation of the case as well as a list of witnesses to potentially identify if you have a conflict. It is then that you learn if you’re being assessed for a criminal or civil trial (there are notable differences between both). A civil trial requires six jurors and two alternates whereas a criminal trial needs 12 jurors plus one or two alternates (who get dismissed just before the first witness testifies). Civil trials rely on jurors to make their decision on a balance of probabilities while criminal trials require jurors to assess whether or not there’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
When charges involve lengthier prison sentences, it’s up to the accused to decide if they want a trial with a jury or just with a judge alone.
Potential jurors are determined by having slips of paper with their information put into a rotating drum and pulled at random (it’s almost like numbers pulled at a bingo hall). One by one, people are called up when the court registrar reads the juror number on the summons, the community the person lives in, and their current profession.
There are certain reasons someone can be excused from a jury, including financial hardship or for a medical condition. Uou’ll get your chance to address the judge privately. A person can get dismissed right away, put back into the jury pool for another trial, or put onto the jury for the case in question.
For civil trials, the lawyers for both sides have a certain number of “pre-emptory challenges” where they can ask for a potential juror to be excluded for any reason they deem fit (profession, demographic etc.). But once those challenges run out, like in one of two civil trial jury sessions I sat through, they’re stuck with whoever is deemed fit to serve.
After the jury was impanelled for the first civil trial involving an automobile collision, the process began anew after a break for lunch. You can bring your own or head out of the building. After a full eight-hour day, my slip of paper wasn’t called and I had to come back the next day.
There is a lot of waiting, so bring your phones, tablets or computers (and a way to charge those devices) or other reading materials. Amid all the distractions, you hear chit-chat filling the rooms and corridors outside the courtrooms. One of the comments I overheard that stuck with me is how this all will be like Law and Order, and let me tell you it isn’t even close.
Criminal trials seemingly have a different procedure. Tiered groups are created using the same random process. For the trial I was chosen, it wasn’t until the second day that I ended up near the end of the first group of 20 for the first trial screening of the day. We were required to complete a lengthy questionnaire and it required us to provide honest answers on a variety of issues related to the trial (for example, were we victims in any way related to one of the allegations contained in the list of charges) and the ability to set aside biases.
Based on the order of being drawn, we were escorted into a courtroom and into the witness box beside the judge where we swore or affirmed to be truthful in our answers. The accused, their lawyer(s) and the Crown attorney(s) are in the courtroom at this stage. After being briefly sent out so they all could speak about my ability to serve as a juror (I disclosed I was a journalist and wasn’t sure if I previously covered anything related to the case since I wasn’t allowed to Google the matter), I was brought back in for a secondary round of questions before being appointed to the jury following another affirmation to be impartial and follow vital court principles.
To give you a sense of how hard it is to impanel a jury, for the trial I sat on it worked out to nearly one juror for every four screened — the rest all got discharges for various reasons. During an earlier trial screening for jury duty, the judge was hearing a lot of reasons from people about why they couldn’t serve and the judge was visibly losing patience.
After my appointment to the jury, I was escorted to our temporary base for most of the trial: a jury room off-limits to the public and guarded on the outside by jury staff. You never see the accused (if they’re staying in custody) or the judge getting to and from the courtroom in the back halls. The jury room had a small bar fridge stocked with water and other beverages. There are two private washrooms off the same room. During the trial, a morning snack was provided. Lunch was left to our own devices. Once deliberations began, you get full meals delivered from nearby restaurants. All paperwork stays in the room and the door is locked and/or guarded at all times.
During the trial, you are treated like a judge. You have an assigned seat in the jury box and everyone, minus the presiding judge, stands if they are able to for your entrance and exit. The weight of this formality looms large, reinforcing your importance in the process. At the beginning, I could feel a shiver go up my back. When a collective decision is made that could ultimately affect someone’s liberty and for someone who testifies they were victimized as part of their call for justice, it’s hard not to think about the task at hand and what’s at stake for all involved. While it’s difficult not to think about that, jurors actually cannot factor in those wider consequences while assessing evidence during deliberations. It needs to be based on facts and impartiality.
You are assigned a binder by juror number full of blank, lined sheets of paper. It’s up to you to decide how many – or few – notes you need to take to remember all the testimony and evidence. I wrote out about 34 pages, which proved helpful for me later on as did the notes fellow jurors took. Throughout the trial, you’re simply known to everyone outside the jury room as your juror number.
From the get-go, you are warned you can’t have any interactions inside or outside the courtroom with the accused, the lawyers involved and the witnesses. Sometimes that means avoiding eye contact and creating large distances in public areas (such as riding on a different elevator if you see one of the parties, or waiting for stairs or an escalator to clear).
Something I had to make peace with is that you never get 100 per cent of all the information that’s available. Before you even get to the courtroom, the lawyers and judge sort out what can legally be presented as evidence. Not doing any research about anything related to the case is also a requirement, and while I thoroughly followed that requirement principle it goes against every instinct that I have as a journalist to try to dig up facts and answer every unknown and curiosity.
During the trial, objections and discussions involving the lawyers and the judge happen without the jury. I have seen this in a few other instances during my 11-year career in journalism when I occasionally covered courts, and under the law those discussions can’t be publicly reported until the jury “retires” for deliberations.
Throughout the entire trial process, including deliberations, written questions can be sent in a sealed envelope to the judge through a court services officer from the jury room. All parties in the trial meet with the judge to review the question(s) and once an answer is ready and agreed upon, the jury gets called into the courtroom to hear that answer. This was a process availed of multiple times during our trial.
To get a sense of how detailed the instructions can be to a jury, check out a template put out by the National Judicial Institute – a Canadian non-profit dedicated to “building better justice through leadership in the education of judges in Canada and internationally.”
As the document points out, juries are “judges of the facts” while the presiding judge is the “judge of the law.” But that doesn’t necessarily make jury duty less confusing or daunting.
The “charge to the jury,” or the final list of instructions and things to consider during deliberations, can be dozens of – if not into the hundreds of – pages long. The document in our case, which was read out in full throughout an afternoon and the following morning by the judge and then printed out for each of us, was more than 100 pages. As the template notes, all instructions need to be considered as a whole with no favouritism to any one line or principle.
Here is just a partial list of reminders you receive as a juror: The presumption of innocence, the art of defining “beyond a reasonable doubt,” reiterating that it is on the Crown attorney(s) to have the burden of proof, the importance of setting aside prejudice, bias and sympathy, not using any information from sources outside of evidence given in the courtroom, the difference between direct and indirect/circumstantial evidence, what’s credible evidence and what’s reliable evidence, assessing evidence from witnesses, restricting an assessment of evidence based on answers to questions and not the questions that prompted the answer (unless the witness agrees), recounting of testimony from witnesses, and a reiteration the laws applicable to a charge or multiple charges (this can come with a list of factors to review like a decision tree).
Exhibits introduced during a trial as well as one’s common sense and good judgment are among the few tools you bring with you into the jury room. While you are given a lot of guidance and instruction, but without a legal education it feels overwhelming to say the least.
There is no road map or procedure to follow on how to carry out jury deliberations. It’s all decided behind closed doors. What about timeframes? There are none other than you’re done when you’re done. The first step is for a foreperson to be elected by fellow jurors, and they are responsible for leading deliberations and ensuring everyone gets a voice. Verdicts must be unanimous, and if a unanimous finding can’t be reached after extensive discussion, that gets conveyed to the court. At one point during deliberations, our jury in a public court session heard the judge’s instructions again on carrying out talks after a temporary deadlock.
After the jury “retires” from the court to begin deliberations, you are sequestered – cut off from most of the modern world. Your electronic devices (computers, cellphones, smart watches, e-books tablets, or anything capable of receiving data) get turned over to court services officers at the beginning of deliberations to be locked up. Non-trial-related messages written down on slips of paper can be given to court staff to relay to emergency contacts.
One or more nights in a hotel might be required as part of sequestration. Before you even get to your room, your entire journey is supervised by court services staff and jury constables. Anything containing a shred of news or information is out. See a TV or some sort of screen with information during your limited travels? You’re told to turn your head and do not take it in as that could potentially be grounds for a mistrial.
Speaking from my experience, your hotel room TV is stripped of cables so it doesn’t work and the phone as well as the clock radio are removed. If you’re lucky, you might have an old conventional watch or a microwave capable of displaying a clock (I was one of the few who had one). For those not that lucky, a knock on your room door is needed to ask for the time.
I tried a book of assorted puzzles on my first night and my attention span lasted all of five to 10 minutes before my mind turned to the case and its deliberations. Those thoughts filled my head for about three hours after. Even at night, my mind was consumed and in overdrive. I didn’t have a full night’s sleep in the closing days of testimony and that intensified when sequestered, so to anyone else I’d recommend sleeping whenever the opportunity presents itself.
My second night was more productive: I hand-washed the clothes I brought with me in the bathroom sink with the five-millilitre packet of hand-washing laundry soap that I keep in my journalism emergency travel bag in case we were kept a third night. A meticulous rolling of clothes in towels, an hour of ironing and several hours of leaving items on chairs and next to vents didn’t quite do the drying job. If you end up on a jury and you’re warned about possibly being sequestered, bring fresh clothes for at least three days – you’ll thank me.
Want to go out for a brief walk, stock up on ice, find a beverage, get outside for a smoke or even go into the hallway outside your room? That’s not happening without speaking with the on-duty court staff member outside the rooms and getting an escort. They also do the knock-on-the-door wake-up alert in the morning (they will wake you up before the default time if you want).
I cannot stress the following point enough: The group of Ontario court services personnel I met were probably the most professional public servants I have ever encountered. Anything they could do within the realm of the rules to make you more comfortable, they would do in a friendly manner.
Regardless of the finding in the end, the stakes are very real in different ways for all participants: The accused, the alleged victims, all of their friends and families, the different communities they’re all a part of, lawyers for the Crown and the defence, investigators and witnesses. How they may be impacted needs to be set aside during deliberations, but after those talks end you can’t help but feel for each of those stakeholders as well as how all their impacts intersect.
Under Canadian law, deliberations among jury members in a jury room are protected and can’t ever be revealed unless it’s to a registered health-care professional for treatment. You start out the process as unknowns, but after days together that dynamic fades quickly. Throughout this process, I met wonderful people from a wide range of backgrounds and demographics. That may or may not be typical. Imagine sitting down with 11 strangers and discussing something you or others may or may not have knowledge about, but setting it all aside to commonly rely on an objective set of facts – there will potentially be uncanny similarities alongside stark differences in how those facts are viewed.
How a verdict is reached and what goes into it aren’t publicly known in an effort to allow for frank discussion and viewpoints. It likely means public questions, and potential answers to those questions may never be addressed.
Nothing prepares you for when the verdict is read out by the foreperson (which ended up being me in this case). Varying reactions to the seriousness of the task among all jurors can be easily and publicly observed by anyone watching. It was one of the few times during the trial I felt every single set of eyes in the courtroom on me and to say it was a sombre couple of minutes is an understatement. The court registrar asks the foreperson to respond to the charge (multiple times if there is more than one charge). A lawyer in the court can ask for each jury member to be polled individually.
With the verdict delivered, the jurors’ job is done. All members are thanked for their service and are released from the courtroom. Thankfully the judge overseeing our case came back to hear feedback about the process. The judge said they couldn’t address anything about the trial since sentencing occurs at a future time, but the post-verdict emotional crash left me barely able to properly convey lingering thoughts or my heartfelt appreciation to those at the court we met for their professionalism.
Walking back to my vehicle after being discharged two-and-a-half days after sequestration began, I still felt all the emotion I had in the initial moments after the verdict delivered except I was all alone. Until I drove away and made my way back to familiar surroundings, it was simply surreal to be suddenly removed from an extraordinary environment. All those who perform jury duty are thankfully provided with information on no-cost counselling after a trial concludes.
As I come to the end of this lengthy reflection written based on what I recalled from memory days earlier, I’m appreciative of the overall experience but wish I knew a lot of what I learned going into the whole process. I can’t help but come back to that figurative roller coaster I mentioned at the beginning. It took about three days for my emotions to settle, and I think it came after a gradual realization that all of the factors mentioned above forcefully came together at once after the verdict. The convergence of everything was as surprising as how uninformed my original expectations were.
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Part two of this series will look at why juries matter to the accused, the alleged victims, and the administration of justice.
Part three of this series will examine the current jury system and the calls for reforms, including improved compensation.
