A three-month-long drugs trial costing $1m (£485,000) has been abandoned in Australia after it emerged that jurors had been playing sudoku for almost the entire duration of the hearing.
Sydney district court judge Peter Zahra discharged the jury on Tuesday after the foreperson admitted she and four or five other jurors had been passing the time by playing the numbers game.
It seems the jury got busted because “[w]hile one of the accused was giving evidence, he noticed the jurors were writing vertically and not horizontally.” I can imagine the talk when the jury got together to deliberate:
“You’ve put this nine in the wrong place, that’s why your sudoku’s got messed up later.”
“Ah yes. I should have been paying attention. Those damned lawyers kept talking to us and disturbing me.”
As for the headline of this post, well, what could be more appropriate when the foreperson is caught playing in court?
(Link via email from Mahendra Shikaripur.)