English Audio Request

Twelve angry, calm, sympathetic, hostile, but above all human … men
Your fellow jurors may be weirdos and freaks, but the jury system is a democratic safety net
The day I began jury service, a friend of mine went to prison. Nothing to do with me, obviously. If you are sitting on a jury and recognise anyone in the court (witness, lawyer, viewer in the public gallery) you must excuse yourself – as happened in one of the cases I was allocated, where a likeable young man was sworn in, took one look at the defendant, waved, got up and left the room.
No, my friend's regrettable fate was just a coincidence, a strange thing that happened on the day I began a strange adventure. Perhaps you read about his case? Michael Arnold was the agent for Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music. Half a million pounds went missing from the composer's bank account and Michael was charged, initially, with theft. When that charge was dropped, he pleaded guilty to false accounting and, two weeks ago (surprisingly, since Michael is 76, overweight, in poor health and leans heavily on a walking stick), he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
The strange thing is I never had any sense of Michael as a bad man. He has always been very kind to me. I have played poker with him for years. (The newspapers described him as an "addicted gambler". We should be so lucky. He played cautiously, for relatively small stakes, and, until the stress of the trial hit, he was not a loser. God knows why he needed the money, but it was not for the reasons the prosecution put forward.)
In the aloof and prickly card room, Michael went out of his way to look after me. He gave me advice. When my father was ill, he phoned regularly to ask if he could help. When my father died, Michael came to the wake, to pay tribute to a man he had never met.
So, I began jury service with a shocking lesson that good men can do bad things, for reasons I may never understand. This sent me to court in an extremely nervous frame of mind. I was relieved when it turned out that I was to spend the first day sitting in the waiting room for six hours with no trial. The lights were yellow, the food was grim, we weren't allowed out for cigarettes and internet access was £6 per person per hour (a charge so astonishing, when the building has wireless anyway and none of us had chosen to be there, that I reckoned its evil greed deserved rewarding and was rather sorry I hadn't brought my laptop).