In the Tennessee trial of Sharron Chason the jury was able to send written questions to the judge, but like all juries they only got to speak when they delivered their verdict: not guilty.

Serving on a jury is incredibly frustrating. The only time you get to talk in the courtroom is during voir dire—and then it’s only to answer personal questions you don’t want to answer.

Few states permit jurors to ask questions of witnesses (as Tennessee does), so a juror usually has to sit there biting her tongue when the lawyers don’t ask the obvious questions.

You sit for hours and hours in silence listening to a long string of inarticulate, ill-informed, prevaricating,  angry, biased, and sometimes just plain stupid witnesses. Then the lawyers try to tell you what to think. And finally the judge reads you a long, legalistic set of instructions and a counterintuitive verdict form.

The first time you get to talk about the trial—about what you think and how you feel—is when you go into deliberations. Unfortunately, by then you probably would rather not talk to the eleven strangers locked in the room with you.

The only time the jury really gets to speak is through its verdict. But a verdict isn’t a nuanced message: a verdict generally amounts to little more than “guilty” or “not guilty.” And that’s why jury duty is frustrating.

Sharron Chason’s attorney, Dan Warlick, said something in his closing argument that perfectly expressed the way I felt as a juror: he said the case had been “dumped in [their] laps.” I thought it was particularly apt in this trial, because the State of Tennessee’s many investigators had neither been able to say definitively that Mr. Chason was a homicide victim nor even definitively what drug it was that resulted in his death.

This is one reason, I believe, that so many people want to avoid jury duty. We all know that a criminal trial only takes place when the system fails. The police have failed to prevent a crime. The prosecution has failed to negotiate an equitable plea agreement. The defendants—likely—believe they can wiggle out of it or feel (rightly or wrongly) they haven’t done anything to deserve punishment.

Only when the justice system fails in every way does a jury have to play god. That’s an onerous job for most of us.