feels when a jury returns from deliberations and announces a guilty verdict.
My reasons for wondering of course are to do with the guilty verdicts handed down in the "Mushroom" case. This is the case where a woman named Erin Patterson cooked a meal of "beef Wellingtons" and three of her four guests died after eating death cap mushrooms in the meal put before them. She claimed it was a "terrible accident" but the jury decided otherwise.
It took a week for the jury to come to their conclusion on all four counts - three of murder and one of attempted murder. I am trying to imagine what it would be like to be waiting...and waiting for the verdict.
"They can't have been too certain," someone said in a line in the supermarket.
"It has to be a unanimous decision," someone else said, "There might have been someone trying to hold out against that."
We will never know because jury members are not allowed to talk to the media and share their views. I said nothing but I suspect that the jury was being careful. A good jury will go through the "evidence" put before them very carefully. Their decision will have a very big impact on everyone involved. It does not matter which was they go in deciding guilt or innocence there are going to be losers. In a murder trial everyone loses. There are no winners.
I think we forget that. I wonder how her family was feeling, particularly her two children. Unless she wins an appeal she will spend at least the next twenty years of her life in prison, quite possibly longer than that. She will get very little sympathy or support there. She is not like a woman who has killed to protect her young. She did not lash out in anger and then admit and regret it. The jury has concluded she planned to kill people who had done her no harm and carried out that plan.
I wonder what she thought as she waited for the verdict. Does she still know or believe she has not deliberately harmed anyone? Does she wish she had done things differently? If she had been found "not guilty" would she have been thankful or would she be gloating? It is impossible to know.
The view in the line in the supermarket seemed to be that Erin Patterson is guilty and that she deserves to be locked away for life. Nobody seemed to be wondering how she might feel. Although one person expressed sympathy for her children the general view was "they are better off without her".
I said nothing at all and prowled off as quickly as I could. There are no winners when murder is committed.