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I served on a jury fairly recently, and it was a much more mundane thing than anything you'd see in a Hollywood film. Whole thing took 10 hours start to finish. Got picked from the pool, had the case presented by the prosecutor, heard witness testimony, the defense attorney made his case mostly by questioning the prosecution's witnesses, closing statements, deliberated very briefly (it was not a complex case) and delivered the verdict and went home. We were paid about $40 for the day plus travel mileage, and lunch was ordered off a menu and delivered to our deliberation room, presumably from the courthouse cafeteria. The food was actually pretty good.

The high-profile cases like SBF's are a tiny fraction of jury trials in the US, most trials have no significant risk of jury tampering and the jury is not sequestered, meaning that if we had needed more time for deliberation, we would have just gone home for the evening and shown up at the courthouse the next day. We did have our phones collected at the start of the day and returned at the end, which seemed like a reasonable precaution against both "independent research" and distractions/interruptions, and would have also made jury tampering somewhat more difficult if anyone was so inclined.




y'all got lunch? We have to bring our own.




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