The Jury's Out - Reflection

             I took on the role of a judge for The Jury’s Out game. I think that being in the shoes of a judge is the best position to be in for this assignment because it was really interesting to have both sides of the argument presented and backed up with evidence. I thought that the opening statement from the prosecution was extremely well presented, and it had me immediately moved to their side of the argument.

For The Silmarillion I was assigned the high elf character, and this definitely played a role in some of the questions that we asked as a jury. For example, we asked, “How could you justify killing elves for the sake of an object, especially ones from the son’s own kin (kin-slaying)”. When it comes to being a judge you definitely have to remain neutral throughout the trial, but there definitely is a possibility of bias from the jury. For instance, when it comes to questions about the elves there were members of the jury who were assigned the position of an elf for the novel. Nevertheless, we also asked questions about the oath, and we asked the defense their thought process of the burning of the ships and if they thought that was an appropriate move. This question definitely started a spark in the court as the defense was claiming that it is fine what they did because they weren’t aware of the full terms of the oath. The prosecution then started to rebuttal that argument and they started to go back and forth for a little bit on that topic. 

At the end we as a jury all agreed that the prosecution overall had a stronger argument and that the evidence they presented was very strong. They came in with a list of crimes committed and were just really prepared. We didn’t have any differences of opinion when it came to picking a side, I feel that even though we didn’t quite discuss throughout whose side we thought was stronger, we shared the same opinion throughout.