The Juror

Raymond Doucette had driven the number 7 bus through the streets of Halifax for nineteen years, and in all that time he had never been inside a courtroom. So when the envelope arrived in March, summoning him for jury duty, his first reaction was to look for a way out of it. His supervisor, however, reminded him that the company would keep paying his salary, and his wife pointed out that he had been complaining for years that nobody did their civic duty anymore. "Now it's your turn," she said, smiling.

The case was a burglary. Six months earlier, someone had broken into a jewelry shop on Spring Garden Road at night, smashed a display cabinet and escaped with watches and rings worth about forty thousand dollars. The accused was a twenty-three-year-old man called Kevin Marsh, who had a previous conviction for shoplifting and who lived three streets away from the shop. He sat at a table beside his lawyer, staring at his hands, and pleaded not guilty.

For the first two days, the prosecution's case seemed overwhelming. A police officer testified that Marsh's fingerprints had been found on the shop's front window. A neighbor claimed she had seen a young man in a gray hoodie running down the street at about two in the morning. And a pawnbroker stated that, a week after the burglary, Marsh had tried to sell him a gold watch. By the end of the second day, Raymond noticed that several of the other jurors had already stopped taking notes. They had clearly made up their minds.

Raymond had not. Nineteen years of watching passengers had taught him to pay attention to small details, and some of the details in this case bothered him. Under cross-examination, the police officer admitted that the fingerprints were on the outside of the window, not the inside, and that the shop was on a busy street where hundreds of people walked past every day. The neighbor conceded that it had been dark and raining, and that she had only seen the man from behind. "Half the young men in Halifax own a gray hoodie," the defense lawyer remarked, and a couple of people in the public gallery laughed.

The watch was the hardest part. The pawnbroker insisted that it was the same model as one of the stolen watches. But when the defense lawyer asked him to read out the serial number, it did not match any of the numbers on the shop's list. Marsh's lawyer then called his grandmother to the stand. She explained, in a trembling voice, that the watch had belonged to her late husband, and that she had given it to Kevin because he needed money for his rent.

When the jury finally withdrew to deliberate, the foreman, a retired accountant named Gerald, suggested a quick vote to see where everyone stood. Ten hands went up for guilty. Only Raymond and a young nursing student called Megan voted not guilty. Gerald sighed. "Look, he has a record, he lives nearby and he was trying to sell a watch. What more do you want?"

"Proof," Raymond replied quietly. He reminded them that the judge had told them they could only convict if they were sure beyond reasonable doubt, not just fairly sure. Then he went through the evidence one piece at a time, the way he checked his bus every morning before leaving the depot: the fingerprints that anyone could have left, the witness who had seen nothing but a back, the watch with the wrong serial number. "If I had a previous conviction," he said, "would that make me guilty of every crime in my neighborhood?"

The discussion went on for the rest of the afternoon and most of the next morning. One by one, the others began to change their minds. Some admitted that they had been influenced by the young man's record; others confessed that they had simply wanted to go home. Shortly after lunch on the third day, Gerald informed the court officer that they had reached a unanimous verdict: not guilty.

Raymond never found out for certain whether Kevin Marsh had broken into the jewelry shop. But three months later, a local newspaper reported that police had arrested two men from Montreal for a series of similar burglaries across Nova Scotia, and that some of the stolen watches had been found in their car. Raymond cut out the article and put it in his wallet. He still has it. Whenever a passenger complains about jury duty, he shows it to them before they get off the bus.