Sometimes you have to stand for principles over friendship.
When I lived in Toronto way back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the planet, I lived with four of my friends in a house as we tried to keep costs down in a very expensive city.
One of my friends and housemates, whose name was Mike, was in law school at the time and was dating a young woman who was also studying to be a lawyer. The girlfriend, who I will call “Jane” because I forget what her real name was, had to prepare for a mock trial as part of one of her classes.
Jane was appointed as the prosecutor in the trial, the nature of which was still to be announced, and another law student in her class was to take on the role of defence.
Both the prosecution and defence in the case, which was to be judged by the teacher of the class, had to supply the jurors for the mock trial, so Jane asked my roommates and I (minus Mike who couldn’t sit on the jury because he was Jane’s boyfriend) to be part of the jury and, with some of her other friends who also agreed to be jurors, Jane’s friends accounted for nine of the 12 members of the jury.
Apparently, the defence lawyer didn’t have as many friends as Jane, so it looked as if the jury would be weighted in her favour, which pleased Mike a lot as the case would be decided by the majority votes of the jury.
So, on the day of the trial, we all hustled into a real courtroom, which was utilized so the law students could get the feel of what it was like to try a case in an authentic setting, and jurors filled the jury box.
The case that was presented to us involved a restaurant being sued by a customer who slipped on a french fry that had fallen on a hallway in the restaurant and broke their hip.
Jane was to take the side of the person who was suing the restaurant and things started going sideways for her right from the beginning.
The fact is I grew up in a family that owned and ran two restaurants, and I spent much of my younger years peeling potatoes for French fries, washing dishes and serving tables.
(I was never given an allowance as a kid because my parents said if I needed money, I should go work at one of the restaurants.)
As Jane did her best to convince the jury that the person with the broken hip was a victim of the restaurant’s negligence as it left a fallen French fry in the hallway for them to slip on, I just didn’t see it that way at all.
After spending so many years working at my family’s restaurants and seeing more than my share of tipsy people not watching where they were going and banging into walls and tripping over the smallest things on the floor, my natural instinct was to immediately come to the defence of the restaurant.
My roommates and I all knew each other since we were young(er), and they had also spent a great deal of time working at the restaurants in every capacity they could, and it turned out they also had little tolerance for what they perceived as someone stupid enough to slip on a French fry, hurting themselves.
Jane was gobsmacked when she realized that the majority of the jury was not feeling much sympathy for her (make believe) client, despite her best arguments and, of course, the fact that nine of the jurors were chosen by her.
In the end, Jane lost the case in a 7-5 vote, and then the judge (teacher) asked us separately why we voted the way we did.
I explained my long history working in restaurants but when the judge asked me if Jane’s arguments held any merit for me, I simply said “not really”.
My roommates said pretty much the same thing.
I’ll never forget looking at Mike who was observing the trial and seeing that his eyes were about as wide as I had ever seen them, and his face was as red as a beet at what he was witnessing.
Afterwards, he told all of us off and said Jane would now get a bad grade in that course as a result of the verdict, and we had a duty as his friend to back up his girlfriend.
Mike said what made it even worse was that the teacher and Jane’s classmates saw her lose a case packed mostly with people she had chosen herself, so she now looked like a pretty poor lawyer wannabe.
We explained the best we could that we just didn’t buy what Jane was trying to sell us, and we had a duty to the justice system to vote with our beliefs.
Jane and Mike didn’t talk to us for a long time after that.
I don’t know whatever happened to Jane after that, but she and Mike didn’t date much longer and Mike eventually got over it, but to this day he’s still sore every time the subject comes up.
Sometimes things just don’t go your way, no matter how stacked it seems in your favour.