I served on a jury in 1996 and got a letter about it last month. Twenty-nine years later, the letter came from the court, on court paper, and asked me to confirm my recollection of the verdict. Courts don’t do that. I called a lawyer I know, and he said in thirty years he’d never seen one either. He asked me to send him a photo of the letter, and he called me back that same night, which he never does. He said the case number on that letter was real, and the case was real, and it had been reopened in February.
The reason it was reopened was listed as a “records discrepancy,” which didn’t tell me much. I asked him to look up the original case, and he said the file had been moved to an archive years ago. He managed to get a copy of the docket and read it to me over the phone. The defendant had been convicted, sentenced, and released years ago, so there was no obvious reason for anyone to contact the jury now. Then my lawyer noticed something strange in the transcript. My name appeared in the jury list, but the signature beside it wasn’t mine.
I told him that was impossible because I remembered signing the paperwork at the courthouse. He asked me whether I still had anything from the trial, and I remembered an old folder in my attic. Inside were my jury summons, a parking receipt, and the questionnaire I’d filled out before the trial. Everything matched except for one page I had never seen before. It was a handwritten statement supposedly signed by me, saying I had witnessed something outside the courthouse on the final day. I hadn’t witnessed anything, and I was certain I had never written those words.
The next morning, the lawyer asked me to meet him at his office. He had found the original police report, and one section had been added several years after the trial ended. It mentioned a witness who had refused to come forward in 1996 but had recently contacted the court. The witness had given them a box containing several documents from the case, including something that apparently changed the reason the trial had been reopened. My lawyer looked at me before sliding the final document across the desk. It was a photograph taken outside the courthouse on the day the verdict was announced, and standing behind the jury entrance was a man I recognized immediately.:::
