American writer William Arthur Ward is noted to have said, “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”

Over the past year, there has been mounting speculation in the legal community about how juror opinions will be impacted by the pandemic along with the political and social crises the American people have faced in the year 2020 and into 2021. While knowing that changes in juror psychology were almost a certainty, what those changes would look like was, and, for the most part, still is, pure speculation.