Making sense of the evidence : jury deliberation and common sense

In this chapter, we describe how the juries made sense of the evidence about railway stations in Sydney, the anticipated target of the attack, the behaviour of the accused in leaving his bag on the train and possible terrorist links with such an attack. This was, therefore, an examination of the strength of the prosecution case, the credibility of the accused and the plausibility of the story he told on the witness stand. Excerpts of the deliberations are reproduced below. We transcribed the verbatim exchanges between jurors, using boldface to emphasise the words that were most germane to the analysis.