Frustratingly, on a few occasions juries got it very wrong. So much could sway a bunch of inexperienced people, of mixed backgrounds and views, to go either way. And occasionally they made a totally incomprehensible decision. All it took was a group of malleable jurors and a passionate – but misguided – one to sway them.

In Richard Jupp’s view, formed after forty years of appearing in court, on both sides of the bench, juries often convicted or acquitted on emotions rather than on facts. He likened juries to a lucky dip – you never knew quite what you were going to get.

The system wasn’t as bad as portrayed in a television show many years ago, with the late comedy genius Tony Hancock, whom he had loved. One episode featured an unemployed Hancock doing jury service. Hancock had discovered that jurors got paid a daily rate equal to an entire week’s dole money, so every time the rest of the jury reached a verdict, one way or the other, he would convince them to reverse it in order to prolong the trial and increase the meagre amount of his earnings.

Although a fiction, there had been genuine instances of bizarre behaviour in jury rooms which made it seem not so far-fetched. For example, after the trial of a double murderer, here in Sussex, had ended, it was revealed that drunk members of the jury had resorted to consulting a Ouija board in the hotel where they were sequestered, to communicate with the spirits of the murder victims, to help them with their verdict.

It was not surprising there were occasional instances of odd behaviour when a group of total strangers, generally lay people, were put into a daunting environment and had to reach decisions that would make or destroy many people’s lives – the lives of both the accused and of the victims or their loved ones.

And despite what some tabloids screamed on their front-page splashes, prisons were not holiday camps. In Jupp’s view, most UK prisons were brick shithouses, filled with bullies. Nasty, scary places where you were confined with total strangers, a percentage of whom were likely to be violent. A place where you were not simply deprived of all the liberties and luxuries you’d previously taken for granted, but a horror hotel, where there was no pillow menu, no breakfast list to hang on your door, no privacy – frequently an open toilet where you had to perform your functions behind a plastic curtain, inches from your cellmate’s face – and scant relief from the relentless tedium and the constant threat of being brutalized by other inmates. One wrong look or ill-chosen word and your face could be slashed open, boiling porridge poured on your genitals, or worse.