A Summer That Stripped Away My Sense of Superiority: Behind JRF's Interactive Instagram Game on Lay Participation in Trials

Introduction

This summer, Taipei felt like a pressure cooker, with the pandemic adding to a sense of pent-up frustration. As domestic COVID-19 transmission eased, people gradually took off their masks and returned to the streets to make their voices heard on public issues. For the first time in 12 years, the Judicial Reform Foundation (JRF) returned to the streets, staging a 24-day sit-in outside the Legislative Yuan to advocate a dual-track system of lay assessors and juries and oppose the rushed passage of the draft Citizen Participation in Criminal Trials Act.

With the legislative deadline approaching, the entire organization sprang into action. A group of college students-mostly law majors-crowded into the small glass room at Chin-Nan Church, constructed a family tragedy, broke down courtroom procedure in detail, and turned it all into an interactive Instagram game as their way of engaging with the issue.

A project that left them second-guessing themselves-and challenged the way they saw the world.

If you click on this Instagram post, you will see a man pointing at himself with an exaggerated, dumbfounded expression. The caption reads: "Murderers Deserve to Die! Ah... Wait? Why Did I Suddenly Become a Judge?" Next, the man talks about his daily life as a food delivery worker and being an armchair judge on the internet... One day, he sees a news headline reading: "Family Tragedy! Top University Medical Student Breaks the Law and Allegedly Commits Patricide!" Just as he is about to hammer away at his keyboard to publicly try the perpetrator, he suddenly receives a "Lay Judge Notification," and the story unfolds...

After the game went live, it reached tens of thousands of people in just three days and was shared nearly a thousand times. Many users responded: "That was eye-opening-thank you."

This article takes readers behind the scenes with the game's creators: How did they design the story? What trade-offs and reflections shaped the process? And what challenges did they face in learning how to communicate beyond the legal field? (Yes... for law students, crossing disciplines is no small feat.)

"We wanted to heighten the difficulty of 'adjudication,' which is why we chose a domestic violence case that people easily form emotional connections with."

"We quickly decided to make an interactive Instagram game because I love scrolling through Instagram myself," said Li-Cheng, who was responsible for the copy. The idea was inspired by an interactive game previously created for the International Day Against Homophobia. Beginning with a game of Truth or Dare, that project let players' choices determine the story, placing them in the middle of school bullying and allowing them to witness the pressure and discrimination experienced by people with different gender expressions. The challenge in advocating a dual-track system of lay assessors and juries was that the judiciary feels remote to most people: unless someone has been involved in litigation, it is difficult to imagine what happens in a courtroom, and institutional reform does not easily resonate with the public.

To keep the game grounded in everyday life, the story begins from the perspective of a food-delivery worker. "He's just an ordinary person with a sense of justice and nowhere to put it-just like us," Li-Cheng said. Ruby, who was responsible for the illustrations, recalled that the team considered several other real-life scenarios for the central case, including two friends arguing before one suffers a fatal heart attack, and a husband intervening to protect his wife. They ultimately chose a domestic-violence setting. "Family is the most vulnerable part of everyone's life, and it's easy to project your own emotions onto it." "We wanted to make 'judging' harder, so we chose a domestic-violence case that people would easily connect with emotionally." Other details-including the defendant's gender and educational background-could also affect people's judgment, so the team spent considerable time building the character's background and personality. "We added details such as the defendant being a medical student and trying to stop the bleeding afterward. The point was to make people spend three more seconds-or even three more minutes-thinking about the motives behind what happened." "We even debated for ages over whether the defendant should greet a neighbor when they met!" the team recalled, laughing.

"At first, we wrote the prosecution and defense arguments using the three-step framework from criminal-law exams. Then we reread it and thought: Who on earth could play this?"

To bring out the core differences between lay-assessor and jury models, the team put particular effort into the deliberation stage. "The biggest difference is the role of the professional judge. Under a lay-assessor system, professional judges and lay assessors decide the case together; under a jury system, jurors deliberate independently," Fu-Tai explained. The team intentionally gave the judge flawed arguments to test how much players' views of the case would be influenced. "We created characters of different ages and occupations, imagined the perspectives they might bring, and tried to keep the viewpoints balanced," I-Fen said. A male engineer and a homemaker, for example, might respond very differently. But how differently?

"Basically... it was a battle royale of stereotypes-we were just imagining everything ourselves!" the team laughed.

"The hardest part was translating complex procedures and legal terminology into language ordinary people could understand," I-Fen said. There were three layers of difficulty: court procedure, substantive criminal law, and the arguments made by prosecutors, defense counsel, and judges. "At first, we wrote the prosecution and defense arguments using the three-step framework from criminal-law exams. Then we reread it and thought: Who on earth could play this?" Fortunately, Ruby did not have a legal background. "So our rule was: keep rewriting it until Ruby could understand it!"

"My father really grabbed me by the neck before, so I know how hard it is to reach out and grab something in that state of dizziness."

The team later developed an "upstream/downstream" division of labor: members who were strong on legal systems and argumentation built the framework, while those stronger at expression and translation turned it into accessible language. Because Li-Cheng had experienced domestic violence as a child, he was able to draw on personal experience when writing the testimony of the defendant and the defendant's mother. "My father really did grab me by the neck before, so I know how hard it is to reach out for something when you're dizzy like that."

Ruby single-handedly handled the game's overall visual design. "Because Taiwan had not yet implemented a lay-participation system, I could only refer to courtrooms in Japan and the United States and try to imagine what a Taiwanese courtroom might look like after implementation," she said. The process also required extensive coordination and fact-checking with JRF staff. "They surrounded us like angels and helped so much!" "The rest of us just talked while Ruby hugged her drawing tablet and gave us a pained smile..." the team joked as Ruby looked ready to cry.

"I used to have a certain sense of superiority, as if studying law somehow made me better than other people. Later I realized how few lives I had actually seen and how little I had experienced. What on earth had I been so cocky about...?"

After the IG game went live, it received enthusiastic responses within just three days. One of the replies read:

"I'm a law student. Before starting the game, I read the facts and thought this had to be much simpler than the hypotheticals we study in class-it would be embarrassing if I couldn't figure it out. So I instinctively started searching my head for doctrines and analytical frameworks, only to find that none of them worked. Value judgments can't be solved simply by piling up legal knowledge. It was eye-opening."

That response captured exactly what the Advocacy Department hoped the game would convey: how difficult judging can be. Take the act of "cutting the carotid artery." Was it an accidental injury caused while the defendant was being grabbed by the neck, or-viewed through common experience-an act intended to cause death? When the team discussed the script, they voted internally and split 50-50. Because the question turns on life experience and value judgments, there is no single absolute answer.

"Therefore, we hope to leave the ending open for players to interpret individually," I-Fen said.

At the end of the game, whether players chose guilty or not guilty, they arrived at the same image: a family portrait from a time when the family was still whole. The caption read, "Thank you for experiencing this with us." That was what the Advocacy Department most wanted to say after completing the project. It is easy to sit behind a screen and pass judgment with a keyboard, as though typing "Guilty! All murderers deserve to die!" fulfills our responsibility as citizens. But when we are the ones sitting in judgment, when the parties' words strike close to home, when the prosecution and defense offer competing accounts, and when our decision will affect another person's entire life-are we willing to approach that power with greater humility?

"What interning at JRF taught me... I realized that I had carried a certain sense of superiority, as if studying law somehow made me better than other people. Later I saw how few lives I had actually encountered and how little I had experienced. What on earth had I been so cocky about...?" Fu-Tai's reflection may be the best way to sum up that summer.