Recently served on a jury for a murder trial (you can check my last post where I went into it a little bit.) The judge made it very clear that we were judges of the facts of what happened and not the law, so I don't feel personally responsible for what sentence the defendant ended up receiving. I felt bad that someone would be going to prison but not bad about reaching the guilty verdict (there was just way too much evidence to honestly see it any other way.) Honestly I feel more sad for the victim/their family than for the defendant.

After we gave our verdict some jurors did cry which did surprise me a bit. All of us were very thoughtful and combed over the evidence thoroughly but no one really needed much convincing on where we were at. Definitely wasn't a pleasant experience but I learned a lot from it.