The jury’s out on phone addiction

I’ve been doing jury service this past fortnight and can assure you that jurors really do perform their duty diligently.

As for the police, I’m not so sure. At least one of the trials I was on was so badly prepared, with the evidence so sketchy, it should never have got to court. But when the police are being starved of resources this is the result.

It was another example of the economic illiteracy of slashing public services for the sake of it. If you don’t fund detective work properly you waste tens of thousands of pounds when it gets to court and possibly allow guilty people to go free because there’s insufficient evidence to convict.

But the main memory I’ll take from being a juror came at deliberation time when all of us were ordered to place our mobile phones in a safe until we’d finished.

Watching 12 people not knowing what to do with their hands, for hours on end, and some of the younger ones get serious withdrawal symptoms, was a fascinating window on modern human behaviour.

Whoever invents a dummy phone to wean people off slowly, the way vaping does with ciggies, will make a fortune.