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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 10:57 AM EDT |
I've been a juror on two occasions for criminal trials. The alternates sit
in the jury box during trial and do not see any more or less of the
proceedings than a regular juror. When time to reach a verdict, alternates
do
not go into the jury room or participate in the deliberations. If a juror falls
ill during deliberations, the alternate replaces that juror and the
deliberations restart. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 11:50 AM EDT |
This is not a criminal trial, it is a civil trial.
In a criminal trial you must be found guilty unanimously by 12 jurors, so they
keep alternate Jurors throughout the trial
In a Civil case you only have to be found guilty by a subset of the Jurors (I
believe 9), so if you end up with fewer than 12 jurors at the end of the trial
you can still continue.
I'm surprised that on a case this long they didn't keep some alternate jurors in
case some had to drop out, but it may be because of the length of the trial they
didn't want to waste the time of the alternates when they didn't absolutely need
them
The Jury can debate as long as they want. The questions to the Judge can be
public, just like the other Jury questions. But I've been on cases where a
question was submitted and it was given to the lawyers, but nothing in front of
the Jury referred to the question.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 30 2012 @ 06:03 AM EDT |
here's the important thing to remember here: the judge rules
on what the LAW is. the jury decides what
the FACTS are. at the end of the trial when a verdict is
rendered, the judge applies the law to the
facts that the jury finds.
so in this case, the questions on the jury form (the "charge
of the court") are asking about facts, not
about law. did google infringe? was it fair use? was it de
minimis? did google infringe on the patents?
how much did google's infringement of the copyrights and
patents cost oracle in lost revenue (damages)?
these are factual questions.
the judge then figures out what law applies to those facts,
and renders a judgement of the court on the
basis of the law when you look at the facts the jury found.
1. number of jurors -- a minimum of six, a maximum of 12.
alternates are selected at the discretion of
the judge. alternates do not take part in deliberations, and
if, during deliberations, a juror is
removed for whatever reason, deliberations start again from
scratch, which tends to make jurors angry.
because all jurors must be unanimous, it's possible that a
juror switch can hang a trial if the new
juror doesn't agree with the others.
a juror can be removed by the judge for any legal reason.
most common reasons are illness and family
emergency. very occasionally, there will be misconduct (a
juror keeping notes for a book, as in the OJ
murder trial).
2. if the jury can not reach a verdict, this is called a
"hung jury." what happens next is up to the
judge. the case may be settled by the parties, or the judge
may order a new trial. when a jury hangs,
it means there is no verdict, and the judge can not rule on
the law because the jury has not found the
facts of the case.
it is possible for a jury to hang on some questions and not
others. if that happens, the judge may
order a new trial and limit the new trial only to the facts
the first jury was unable to reach a
conclusion on. generally, in a second trial with a divided
verdict like this, the questions the first
jury actually all agreed on are NOT retried.
for example, the jury might find that google infringed the
copyright, but hung on the question of fair
use. a new trial would focus only on the fair use question,
because the infringement question had
already been decided.
3. it is theoretically possible that, yes, the jury could
find for google, and yes, the judge could
find that you can't copyright APIs as a matter of law. yes,
on appeal, for oracle to prevail, the
appeals court would have to overturn both findings, which is
theoretically possible (and typically the
appeals court will go for the law first, so they don't have
to mess with the jury if they find the
ruling on the law was right). however, courts generally give
great deference to what juries find,
unless their findings are so nonsensical as to be beyond
reason.
4. if i understand the way this trial is divided up
(copyright, patent, damages), yes, if google
prevails on all questions, there is no need for a damages
phase.
5. there is no time limit on deliberations. once the
questions are submitted to the jury, the jury is
in charge, not the judge. if it takes them a month to render
a verdict, the judge will not interfere if
the jury feels that they're making progress on each
question. this would be extremely unusual but it
could theoretically happen. the longest deliberation in
california (state courts) i could find in a
quick google search was four months, after a year-long
police corruption trial. the jury returned
verdicts on 8 counts, and hung on 27 counts.
if the jury has a question, they submit it in writing
through the bailiff to the judge. the judge then
assembles the lawyers and parties, and, with the jury NOT
present, they hash out an answer where the
parties argue what they think the answer to the question
should be, and the judge deciding what the
answer should be. then the jury is brought in, the question
is answered, and then the jury returns to
their deliberations with this answer to consider.
as a general rule, all proceedings are public and the judge
will read the question into the record in
open court, as well as the answer. the argument among the
parties about what the answer should be may
or may not be public, depending on the nature of the
question (i.e., if it concerns trade secrets, the
judge may choose to close the argument to the public).
in all of these situations, the judge is the final arbiter
of what the jury sees and hears. his job is
to make sure what the jury sees is as fair as possible from
both parties, and so you'll see, in the
charging conference, that the parties will try to tilt the
jury instructions their way, and the judge
will attempt to scrub the tilt. that's the nature of the
game.
if one party or the other thinks the judge has been unfair
in answering questions or writing the charge
(developing the lists of questions for the jury to answer,
and the explanations of the law that go
along with it), they can, at the conclusion of the trial,
appeal to the trial judge or the appeals
court for a new trial on the basis of reversible error. it
can and does happen periodically, so we may
get to do this again. this judge, however, seems to be
pretty on the ball so far.
also, there's one other standard you should be aware of as
we move to deliberations: the standard of
proof.
most people in the united states are familiar with the
"reasonable doubt" standard, which is used in
criminal trials. in reasonable doubt cases, the jury must
find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that
something happened or did not happen. reasonable doubt is
sometimes defined for juries as a situation
where you'd take an action in the most personal of your
affairs. to pick a recent criminal trial, in
the casey anthony murder trial, the question was, did the
prosecution prove beyond a reasonable doubt
that mom killed the kid? the jury decided that on balance,
mom might have killed the kid, but there was
enough reasonable doubt that something other than mom
killing her might have killed the kid too, that
they had to return a not-guilty verdict. they did NOT say
"mom didn't do it," but they DID say, the
prosecution failed to meet the standard, and so we can't say
she's guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,
and so we have to let her walk.
in a civil trial, generally speaking, the standard is
"preponderance of evidence." this is a lower
standard than reasonable doubt, and it's used generally in
cases where nobody will go to prison. with
preponderance of evidence, the jury picks and chooses what
evidence it believes and what evidence it
doesn't believe, and then the side with more credible
evidence wins.
that does NOT mean that the side with more evidence wins: it
means that the side with more evidence
THAT THE JURY BUYS wins, or if the jury buys some from both
sides, then the side that the jury believes
more wins. if the jury decides that larry ellison was lying
through his teeth and nothing he said could
be trusted, but jonathan schwartz was an angel singing
hymns, the question goes to google, even if
oracle produced more documents and testimony. this is a
question entirely for the jury, and what juries
are for.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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