Once again my sister Amy teamed up with me for a mountain bike ride, this time to Chicopee Woods in Hall County, Georgia. It was a beautiful day for a ride, and we managed to cover about 9 miles, although the last 2 miles involved a Amy mostly walking after a couple of accidents. One was running into a tree, but the other was when a root stopped her and I ran up on the back of her. I have found that coaching someone from behind is a challenge.

I have been truly impressed out how quickly she has gotten the hang of serious mountain biking. What’s even funnier is that she is doing so well on bike with no suspension whatsoever.

Having come off of a 64-hour week, I thought jury duty on Tuesday of this week would be a welcome break.

Wrong.

I have personally put 40 hours into the last four days on a trial that involved 12 felony counts, two of them murder. Two more of them would have been murder if two other folks had not lived.

I was elected jury foreperson (foreman is apparently dated now), which turned out to be one of the most hellish experiences I have had in a while. I had to ask God for strength going in there each day; deliberation was a 16-hour ordeal. Some of the other jurors made the whole thing much more painful than it needed to be.

In the end we found the defendant guilty on all 12 felony counts. I had to read the verdict to him; that was an additional heavy experience.

It was appalling how some people were viewing the situation. Your task as a jury is to apply the law to the facts of the case presented in the evidence. I continually had to contradict people who would talk about sentencing influencing whether they wanted to find the defendant guilty. Some would talk about it like a cafeteria plan, sort of a “how about we let him off of this if we give him guilty for this”. I hope to never be in a situation where I face a jury trial, and if I do, I hope those folks have someone among them willing to do the hard thing and make folks stick to what they are charged to do.