It's the miracle of Google, that's what it is. David Salvia's wife Jane was looking for fruit and tree motifs in Tiffany lamps, and somehow she landed in the American Gallery of Juror Art. (It must have been the post on Christine Buckton Tillman's work.)
A lot of people would have clicked "back" in exasperation, but Jane instead remembered her husband's intricate jury duty sketches and notes, from a trial in the mid-1990s.
For the sake of legibility on this site, David created a version of the original sketch with the notes in typeset form:
Together these are a striking record of a jury deliberating, a bit of an archeological find for people like me. Why did he make such detailed notes? He wondered that too, and decided it was the jury itself that pulled his attention:
[A]s I completed my first jury experience, I wanted to document what I considered to be the most compelling part of the experience, and that was my fellow jurors. More so than the actual civil case itself, or the lawyers' performances, it was the surprising and illuminating behavior of the jury that I was most eager to document.
I created the little lists, under which I categorize the jury, so I could better have a framework to understand what I had just been through. As seriously as several of us took the proceedings and our duty, several others were equally disengaged; some entered deliberations completely on the side of the plaintiff, others on the side of the defendant; some seemed open to considering other points of view, and to analyzing their own positions through another lens, while others would not even listen to contrary arguments. It was such a slice of humanity---old, young, white, black, brown, blue collar, professional---and I found the process of throwing us into a room to come to a unified decision simply fascinating.
David now lives in Boston, where he is a graphic designer with the architectural firm Goody Clancy. He says "I still have the pages of notes I took in the trial, including my sketches of photographic exhibits, which proved helpful during deliberation when other jurors' perceptions of testimony proved to be a little shaky." It's easy to imagine that the sketches were helpful indeed.
All rights in these drawings and text are reserved to David Salvia. Many thanks to him for finding this site and allowing them to be shown here.
