We have reached an impasse, I wrote to the judge. Four in favor, two against, one undecided. Please advise as to our next steps. We’d been deliberating for over five hours by the time I sent this note. The court had just bought us lunch for a second day in a row.
We’d heard the term “unidentified white substance” more times than I can count on the first day. But it was a case involving spilled yogurt in a local grocery store. A lady who’d recently had a spinal fusion surgery had slipped on it while grocery shopping with her husband, messing up a part of her back above the surgical site.
I did not raise my juror card before empanelment, when the judge had asked if we harbored any biases against slip and fall lawsuits as a class of litigation, but in hindsight perhaps I could have. Initially my thought was “why are we wasting all these public resources for this?”
But as I listened to the facts of the case, I soon went on to find that this weird little lawsuit contained so many things I already do care about. Women’s pain being ignored. Doctors’ notes being reductive and dismissive. Store employees being replaced by robots that are then called “he” by management, without any seeming introspection about what this means. Then us having to decide what negligence entails, based on what being a reasonable person really is.
It turned out to be a fascinating snapshot of modern human life.
I listened as an aggressive loss prevention guy angrily proclaimed that some of the most stolen items in a grocery store are diapers, baby formula, Gillette razors, and energy drinks, and that’s why they didn’t bother to have cameras in the dairy aisle.
The state of our society, I thought.
Then I got into the jury room. The state of our society indeed.
I did not yet know that I was in for an up close and unforgettable encounter with human psychology, the lens we each bring to a situation that makes our shared experiences essentially non-shared.
But after being reassured by bailiff and judge most of the day that this process would likely only take one day of our lives, we got a late half hour spiel about our duties as jurors, then ushered into deliberations ten minutes before everybody was supposed to go home, with the reassurance that everyone working the case was willing to stay an extra half hour while we handled this. I had learned only seconds before that I would be jury foreperson in this endeavor.
I suppose I could have said no to that role too, but I did not even consider it.
The video we watched at the beginning of jury service was still ringing in my ears. Facts letting us know the time and place we are in. That I am in. The epicenter of American jury trial rights.
It was here in Quincy, MA that our own John Quincy Adams added the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers to the state constitution. It was the law in this place before it became a standard right in the rest of the country. Massachusetts also had the first black people serving on juries, shortly before the Civil War. And yet. Yet.
Women did not serve on juries until 1950.
As I adjusted to this shocking fact, I then learned that women with small children were formally excused from jury duty until the 1980’s.
So as a mom of small children, born in the early 80’s myself, a true jury of my peers has only begun within my own lifetime.
Aware of the momentous nature of such circumstances and how it juxtaposed to finding myself part of a case with a woman judge, a woman bailiff, a woman plaintiff, a woman defense attorney, and three women on a seven person jury, I proudly accepted my nomination as jury forewoman.
But the moment I got in the room with my fellow jurors, I felt a responsibility not just to women of the past, or any of the other women involved in this deliberative process (one of whom I already knew, a local camp counselor who had been very kind to my daughter when she played in the local park) but to the injured woman who brought this lawsuit.
Initially I thought it would be an easy case. She wasn’t asking for much. Slightly under $7k in medical bills, plus whatever we chose to tack on for pain and suffering. Chump change to a major store chain. I honestly wasn’t sure why the case went to trial and they didn’t just settle in the first place.
So I came in there thinking Let’s get this lady her money and have her go back to her life, where she’s edging into retirement age, not able to do the high intensity workouts she used to love, or comfortably pick up her grandchildren.
But I soon learned that my priority wasn’t everybody’s priority.
We also didn’t all hear the same facts or instructions, and because we didn’t have written documentation to refer to (making me wonder why, in the year 2025, that sort of clear and easily-remedied accessibility problem is still allowed to continue), we had to hash it out together in this dingy room, relying on what we picked up in our own heads and brought to a small conference table.
“We will be here tomorrow” I had whispered to the young juror next to me, a computer forensics student, serving jury duty with us on his spring break, on our way in. He nodded his head and said “I was hoping we wouldn’t.”
“The truth is like a diamond,” I found myself telling him the next day. “It isn’t that you are the only one who is doing what the judge said, and the rest of us over here are running amok. It’s that the truth has facets. We have to sit with those, decide what to do with them, those that are known and unknown. Interpretations that have gray areas. We may each decide different things, and it’s clear that here we have.”
I felt a little annoyed that he had wanted to continue to debate everyone, demanding they try to change his mind, while clearly inclined to no such thing. But I couldn’t be too irritated at what I felt was his rigidity in the face of the matter before us, as I remember being a bit like that myself, when younger, before adult life struggle had softened me, widened my tolerance for the gray areas, made me realize that I too live within them in so many ways.
Thankfully it didn’t stop us from happily discussing our favorite Vietnamese foods over the lunch break. I hoped there wasn’t hard feelings.
The other holdout was a man much older, but who looked considerably younger than his years. Kind eyes and a short salt and pepper beard, he said he was self-employed and semi-retired. He had the time. But his business was building large homes on specially selected pieces of land, to where he strongly identified as a business owner who does not want to get sued for an accident.
We needed six of the seven to get anywhere. So there we were, these two and everybody else.
We had some memorable quotes in our long and soon-to-be intractable set of deliberations.
An affable older guy with reddish blond hair, glasses, and a Boston accent, someone who I had learned was the youngest in a family of 9, told us all “look, it was very convenient that there’s no video, no store employee witnesses, no proof or anything on their side. If her husband hadn’t taken these pictures of the yogurt she fell in, we wouldn’t even be in here - they’d have just thrown her out the back door!”
An immigrant father who has kids that graduated from Yale and MIT, but now worries that his high-powered children may never find the time to marry and give him grandchildren, said that it didn’t matter how long the yogurt was on the floor for. That we were getting distracted by this concept of time. “She was injured, so the store has responsibility,” he said. “But she also has responsibility, to see where she is going.”
The camp counselor likened the store robot to other AI, saying “what about when Teslas blow up?” She had what I found to be a very clear-eyed perspective on how automation can be used to make excuses, guard power, put ordinary people at risk.
I felt she got the angle I also saw more than anyone else, but it was clear that we were all very different people, and nobody was going to budge, except our person who was undecided, genuinely feeling pulled in different ways. A former runner herself who had developed a leg injury before she had to stop, her main concern was why the plaintiff hadn’t quit high intensity exercise after her initial spine diagnosis. “As we get older, we have to slow down,” she said repeatedly. “Yet she didn’t.”
We spoke at length about how long is an unreasonable amount of time to not notice a spill. We learned that the grocery store where the incident occurred was local, a place where two of our jurors regularly do their own shopping. I shop at a different branch of the same store chain. So we were familiar with the store layout, and how it’s usually kept, and made jokes about being followed around by the store robot.
I told them I trusted all the witnesses, felt everyone was telling the truth, even that one loss prevention guy who had come off a bit arrogant, but the robot was a witness that was not able to be called and that I did not trust.
Despite the googly eyes and cutesy name, and being called “he” in both sworn testimony and reports, this robot, designed to scan for and alert to spills and keep inventory, was a type of modern automation replacing what had until recently been the work of an actual human with a job. The robot could not say “I’m sure I checked there and saw nothing,” or “it’s possible I missed the spill because it was white yogurt on a white floor.”
The assistant store manager testified that they had employees designated to go around and scan barcodes indicating they checked areas the robot can’t access once per hour, but there was no cross-check of areas it can access. When asked if he had followed the robot around to watch it work, he said no. There was only a policy that if an employee happened to see a spill, they were to clean it up and not leave it. But on a Friday night, he estimated it might have been half an hour since an actual person had been over there.
Me and the camp counselor agreed that there was a business decision made to not assign a human employee to follow up on or double check the robot’s work.
The plaintiff’s husband testified that the yogurt he wiped off her shoe was room temperature to the touch, leading him to assume it had been there for a bit of time.
So to me it was pretty cut and dry. Make the person who got hurt financially whole, and add in a bit for pain and suffering, then call it a day.
But instead we had to call it a draw. So I wrote the letter to the judge, something we finally all agreed upon, saying we had agreed that we must disagree.
The judge’s response came in the form of a two words sentence, delivered by bailiff. She peeked in and said “the judge says keep deliberating.”
“We are kidnapped, held captive,” the camp counselor said, eyes widening.
“I can’t be here tomorrow,” the undecided juror said.
“Look,” I told the group. “Our first vote was a vote of conscience. We did our job and told the judge how we truly believe. Our second vote will need to be a vote of practicality. It’s going to be a different thing. My view is we change votes to reflect the majority decision and proceed from there. We also don’t get bogged down in additional questions the way we did on this one. We try to be very efficient and mindful of time as we do the rest of this, so we are not in here tomorrow.”
I wasn’t sure whether everyone agreed with my stance, but what was important is one person did. Our bearded builder said he would change his vote to get us there. We all thanked him.
The next layer we struggled with was comparative fault - whether our plaintiff bore some fault for her injuries. Our computer forensics student wanted to debate the issues again, but I told him we weren’t going down that path. I would collect yes and no votes and percentages and we would move forward from there, in the interest of time.
More people thought she had some degree of comparative fault than not, which surprised me, as I believe anyone could have accidentally slipped on yogurt in a store. The percentages ranged from 20% to 60%, and our builder suggested we add up the percentages, including the zeroes, then assign her the average, which would make it 18% the plaintiff’s fault. We agreed to that, but then he wanted to round it up to 20%, an easier number to work with. I said I’d be fine with rounding it down to 15%, but not with rounding up, and I wanted the percentage of fault to be accounted for in our monetary award.
Thankfully the majority of the group agreed.
We had some discussion of whether lawyers’ fees would be involved in the comparative fault judgment. I said I know in Louisiana they are, but am not sure about Massachusetts, although I assume they are.
A couple of us suggested adding on $1500 for pain and suffering.
Our builder surprised me when he said that this amount was next to nothing, and that given the upscale area where she lives, our plaintiff may not be happy with even a larger award, but he would recommend rounding it up to $10k.
Meanwhile our computer forensics student wanted to look through all the medical bills carefully, and omit payments for PT, for reasons we did not bother to get the details on.
“I see I am outvoted,” he said, accurately summarizing the view of the rest of the room, which was clearly ready to move on.
I nodded at him, then confirmed to the group that the rest of us had decided the grocery store chain was negligent, the plaintiff bore a comparative fault of 15%, and we were awarding her $10k combined for medical bills and pain and suffering.
I signed our verdict, let the bailiff know, and we sat in the jury box one last time. As we were dismissed, I was not sure if our plaintiff was happy or unhappy with the decision, or just tired of waiting, sitting on a wooden bench with a hurt back, but when I looked her way, her eyes were forward, her expression immovable.
As we walked out, a couple jurors quickly said goodbye and left, the camp counselor and I exchanged numbers, I said friendly goodbyes with our once undecided juror, and the builder offered to drive me home once he knew I had been planning on taking the bus, since my husband had the car and the kids and was attempting to work from home while I did all this.
The next day my life was back to normal. Or something resembling it. I saw the rhubarb in my garden sprouting. “It looks like an alien!” my daughter said. I watched the early morning robins pulling worms. “Bird, bird, hi bird!” my little son said. Yet something had changed for me that wasn’t just a changing of seasons, a first day of spring.
I couldn’t even find the case I served on when I tried to google it, but my mind kept replaying the past two days’ events. The people I’d met, the things I’d learned, the way a jury of one’s peers was made a lot more real (and honestly a little more terrifying) should I ever have occasion to be before one.
I sat in my kitchen watching the usual family shenanigans.
My husband looking at me and starting to dance to Missy Elliott’s “Lose Control” in a way that was sexy enough to both catch my attention and make the children uncomfortable. My daughter saying “Dad, don’t dance. You’re dancing like an old person, a guy who will be dead soon!” My neighbor kid saying “That’s not nice to say he will die! That’s your dad! But I did see a skeleton dancing just like that on YouTube.”
There I was laughing and laughing, because perspective is such a funny human thing, anywhere you encounter it, everywhere you encounter it, whether that’s at home, or from a jury box, or out in the world.
