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There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw)There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw)Posted Aug 26, 2012 0:48 UTC (Sun) by donbarry (guest, #10485)In reply to: There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) by yokem_55 Parent article: There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw)
One does feel that the legal expertise afforded Samsung was second tier compared to that of Morrison and Foerster. But the exclusion of significant exculpatory evidence for Samsung was entirely due to the petulance of the judge, in what is not one of the better exhibits of the judicial system at work.
That said, the continued delineation of an increasingly narrower role for juries and the battles over what they can actually hear is a disturbing one -- it essentially devalues what life experience the jurors can actually bring to bear. Given what was actually heard in court, the jury decision is understandable. If a greater context ("inadmissible!") were provided, the outcome would almost certainly have been different. What trust is actually given to ordinary citizens? The evolution of American bourgeois democracy suggests that increasingly, they are expected to give a decision artfully decided by the actors above them, and merely imprint it with their authority.
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There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 26, 2012 4:43 UTC (Sun) by aristedes (guest, #35729) [Link]
There is no 'increasingly narrower role' for juries with a trial. Since the origins of the modern jury system in 17th century English, juries have been allowed to hear only the evidence which they are legally allowed to hear. Judges have always been considered professional enough to ignore evidence they have seen in court (or outside court). However the legal system has never had that same assumption with juries: they are not given the benefit of the doubt. Their inexperience with the legal system means that they cannot be assumed to understand what is relevant or what is not. Or even that they can be successfully asked to ignore something they have just heard in trial.
You may disagree with this point of view, but it has been the basis of jury trials for literally several centuries.
On the other hand, there has certainly been a move toward fewer jury trials overall. It is a shame that the US Constitution allows for jury trials in cases like this one: highly technical and with a great deal of subtlety. Juries are a good way to keep the judiciary in check, however or complex civil trials they aren't always a good substitute for a judge with decades of legal knowledge, paid to spend weeks or months analysing the evidence in detail, and required to back up their decision with a detailed judgement.
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 26, 2012 21:52 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
The thing to keep in mind is the split between what is the Judge and the Jury are each supposed to be doing.
If it's a matter of "the undisputed facts are this, how does the law apply", it's something that the Judge is supposed to decide.
The Jury comes in when the facts are in question (including things like "this undisputed action was done as the result of this disputed motivation"
This calls for deciding what is probably true in the face of conflicting statement, In most cases with the people making the statements having some self-serving motivation for their statement.
The Jury needs to not only listen to what is said, but evaluate the reliability of the people making the statement.
This is not something that it is good for a single person to do.
The hard thing in a trial like this is to separate out the two aspects, have the Judge decide the matters of Law, and have the Jury decide the matters of fact (i.e. what probably really happened). Trials try to work with the Judge deciding the Law matters by allowing the Jury to only hear the relevant information, and the laws related to that information to keep them from straying 'out of bounds' into areas that they don't have the legal background to understand.
one thing to think of for those who say laymen can't understand the technology Posted Aug 26, 2012 22:09 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
If yo think that laymen can't understand the issues for a technical case and it should instead be decided only by technically trained and certified people, think about how you would feel if this were to happen in other fields
How much would you trust the results if medical malpractice cases could not go to trial and were instead always decided by a board of medical professionals.
Or if all financial related cases were decided by a board of finance people.
Yes, the "jury of our peers" approach does have problems, but all attempts to form "panels of experts" to evaluate things have had much bigger problems.
one thing to think of for those who say laymen can't understand the technology Posted Aug 27, 2012 19:36 UTC (Mon) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]
I'm not suggesting that professional panels replace courts for these kinds of torts, but your example has a significant flaw.
There's a difference between this case and a medical malpractice case. In a malpractice case, you have a doctor (or other medical professional) on one side and a member of the (non-medical) public on the other. Any chauvinism on the part of the medical community will favor one side only.
In the case of Apple vs Samsung, both sides consist of multinational corporations and their associated lawyers and software developers. It's not clear that a panel of their professional peers would favor one over the other.
I do think that there should probably be greater use of special masters in this kind of case, but that's not a guarantee against bias.
one thing to think of for those who say laymen can't understand the technology Posted Aug 27, 2012 21:47 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
having a "Special Master" to investigate and provide explanations and education to the court is very different from having that person decide the entire case.
Part of this case is "are the patents valid", but there is also a substantial part of this case that boils down to "did Samsung intend to infringe" and other "who knew what when and what were they thinking" types of questions. It's exactly this type of thing that a random jury should be deciding, not a panel of experts.
I raised the example of medical malpractice because I was on a Jury for such a case last year. And afterworlds I spoke with the lawyers and they mentioned that there has been talk among the medical community questioning if Jurors are able to understand enough of the medical terminology and other information to be able to make a fair ruling in such cases (among other things, just because there is a test that could have been run, and with 20-20 hindsight may have provided information that changed a diagnosis, was the Doctor negligent in not ordering the test)
This sounds eerily similar to the logic that laymen can't handle the complexities of a case like the Samsung/Apple case.
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 27, 2012 19:58 UTC (Mon) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]
'The thing to keep in mind is the split between what is the Judge and the Jury are each supposed to be doing.
If it's a matter of "the undisputed facts are this, how does the law apply", it's something that the Judge is supposed to decide.'
This case is complicated by the fact that the Judge is deciding *which* fact the jury will be evaluating. And that decision will often decide the outcome.
Also, this case raises a tricky issue. In court, the structure of the trial is supposed to ensure that all evidence will be critically examined by the opposite side. That is *not* the case for "evidence" introduced by a member of the jury during deliberations. Of course, you can't prevent jurors from introducing their own knowledge and experience. However, I think this case (if yokem_55's statement about the jury foreman is correct) demonstrates that the in court portion of the trial and jury deliberations need to be more interactive. For instance, if the jury foreman introduces "facts" from his own experience, another member of the jury should be able to ask questions of the judge or counsel.
In general, I don't see why jurors can't ask questions about facts as well as points of law.
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 27, 2012 21:55 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
>> If it's a matter of "the undisputed facts are this, how does the law apply", it's something that the Judge is supposed to decide.'
> This case is complicated by the fact that the Judge is deciding *which* fact the jury will be evaluating. And that decision will often decide the outcome.
Agreed, but if the two sides don't disagree on a fact, then the Jury should be informed of the fact if it affects their deliberations (for example, when determining the amount of a penalty), but there's nothing that they need to decide related to that fact.
Sometimes a fact becomes "undisputed" at the end of closing arguments. One side may claim some fact, and if the other side doesn't present any contradictory evidence, that fact is assumed to be proven. This came up during the Google/Oracle case where there were some things that Google decided not to spend time arguing, and at the end of the trial Oracle filed a motion to have the Judge declare those items decided as there were no facts in dispute (and the motion was granted)
In any case, Jurors are not supposed to be introducing evidence or providing testimony on 'how things work'. The fact that in this case, reports are saying that the Jury Foreman did exactly that doesn't indicate that the Jury deliberations need to be more interactive, it indicates that the Jury foreman was doing something that he was not supposed to be doing.
Yes, Juror's have the option of sending a question to the Judge, but since that goes through the foreman, it really doesn't work in this case.
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 28, 2012 4:25 UTC (Tue) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]
>Agreed, but if the two sides don't disagree on a fact, then the Jury should be informed of the fact if it affects their deliberations (for example, when determining the amount of a penalty), but there's nothing that they need to decide related to that fact.
Yes. I'm certainly in favor of the bias being toward giving the jurors more information, not less.
>In any case, Jurors are not supposed to be introducing evidence or providing testimony on 'how things work'.
It sounds like the jury foreman did cross a line in this case. But jury decisions will inevitably be informed by the knowledge and experience of the jurors. Which is why counsel are given so many opportunities to exclude potential jurors. I can't imagine why Samsung didn't bounce this guy.
>Yes, Juror's have the option of sending a question to the Judge, but since that goes through the foreman, it really doesn't work in this case.
I think that interfering with another juror's desire send a question to the judge would be an even grosser violation than "advising" the jurors on patent law.
My point was that it would be worthwhile to allow jurors to make requests for additional *evidence*, not merely clarifications of points of law, as is currently the case. While this would certainly have downsides, I think it would be preferable to the current "management" of the jurors.
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 28, 2012 6:09 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
actually, during the trial the Juror's can send questions to the Judge. A couple years ago when I was on a drunk driving case, I did exactly that, and after the next break there was testimony on exactly what I had asked about.
This was a question to an expert witness.
However, remember that as much as you may want to know something, there may be legal reasons why it's not allowed to matter.
Again in the drunk driving case, while the Jury was deliberating, one Juror mentioned that she wished that she knew why the defendant didn't take the stand, and several of us pointed out that the Judge had told us that we weren't allowed to speculate on that. There are a LOT of landmines out there if the Jury starts investigating.
a Grand Jury is a different story, they are empowered to do exactly that, but they don't decide that someone is guilty, they only decide that someone is likely enough to be guilty that the state is allowed to file charges against the person.
you really don't want the people directing the investigation to be the ones deciding guilt.
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 28, 2012 17:28 UTC (Tue) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]
>actually, during the trial the Juror's can send questions to the Judge. A couple years ago when I was on a drunk driving case, I did exactly that, and after the next break there was testimony on exactly what I had asked about.
Wow. I had no idea that such things happened. I thought that jurors were only allowed to ask about evidence already introduced and points of law. I wonder how general this is in US jurisdictions.
>There are a LOT of landmines out there if the Jury starts investigating.
True. But as long as jury questions are mediated by the judge, it doesn't seem like that much of a problem (except for the judge, that is).
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 28, 2012 18:31 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you can ask anything you want, it may be that the Judge decides not to do anything with the request, but you can ask :-)
There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw) Posted Aug 27, 2012 4:49 UTC (Mon) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]
Aristedes: have you actually read accounts of 18th and 19th century court proceedings? The jurors got a much fuller dose than in today's proceedings.
dlang: the division between the trying of facts and law is not so clean cut. John Jay, first supreme court chief justice, in an unusual case with the justices actually hearing a case before a jury, in charging the jury (Georgia v. Brailsford, 1794), spoke, "It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision - you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy".
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