The trial of NJ State Trooper Robert Higbee could well result in jury deliberations beginning on Friday. For the sake of justice, I hope that doesn’t happen.

I’ve heard TV legal commentators say that jurors—like everyone else in a courthouse—expect to finish their work on Fridays and leave to enjoy the weekend. But that’s not true. Jurors aren’t courthouse employees. What happens in a jury deliberation room on Friday afternoon is something different all together.

In the criminal trial in which I served as a juror, we were sent into deliberations early in the afternoon on Friday. I doubt that any of us worried about having to return on Monday morning if we weren’t finished by 5:00. No one said anything about the time.

However, it was clear to me that everyone else involved but the jury—from the judge to the defense attorney—thought our decision should be very simple. The judge, especially, made it clear that she was the interpreter of the law and the law of IL said the defendant was guilty.

It was the judge’s attitude that produced the stress I felt, because from Day One I couldn’t accept that the defendant had committed a kidnapping crime. For two nights I had trouble sleeping, because I kept having visions of being the only person on the jury who felt this way. And when I finally left the jury box to retire to deliberations, my palms were sweating and I wondered if I’d have the courage to do the right thing.

The effect of Friday afternoon is real. If the decision is difficult, as I believe the Higbee verdict is, the effect of being sent into deliberations on Friday may be that the jury will know the judge thinks the decision is easy—a no-brainer, a two-hour deliberation.

• Sidebar: I wonder if any statistics on the timing of deliberations have ever been collected. The ABA conducts some studies, I know, but laypeople—such as bloggers—don’t have access to them. It would be interesting to know how often deliberations begin on Friday and how this correlates to guilty verdicts.

One of the failures of our current approach to jury trials is that no one tells the jury to take their time and deliberate carefully over all the evidence, because that’s what “deliberation” means—not gut instinct, no snap judgments. And that’s why the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” is so ineffective in conveying to a jury the rational approach they must take to the evidence: doubt is not reasonable.