Deciding on an overall winner and then retrofitting answers
to 700
questions to fit that winner decision is not a minor
mistake.
Declaring that a jury was incompetent based on a
chain of
inferences from a couple of second-hand soundbites from press
interviews... that's not a minor mistake either.
You don't have the whole
conversation - after the juror said "so we
skipped it" then maybe they said
"...and went back to it later" or maybe they
said "...and just ticked 'no'
because we couldn't be bothered." You simply
don't know because those quotes
have already been cherry-picked by a
journalist trying to make a short,
interesting article from a long and possibly
not-too-interesting
interview.
At most, these quotes raise a couple of questions that should be
investigated through some reliable legal process: (a) did the foreman
effectively give testimony to the jury and (b) did the Jury think they were
supposed to decide punitive damages. You can't answer those based on a few
words in a press cutting. That's assuming that either of those would be
grounds for overturning a jury verdict: AFAIK you have to pretty much catch
them red handed using a Ouija board or checking Facebook in the jury room
for
that.
This makes me like the UK 'what happens in the jury room stays in the
jury room' law... If you are going to quiz a Jury verdict then it should be
done
with all the due process of a legal disposition, or not at all.
Also
remember that the jury was not asked to decide whether the patents
were invalid
- they were asked to decide whether Apple/Samsung had
presented sufficient
evidence to show that they were invalid.. They
weren't convinced ad no
surprise: if you're a big patent holder like Apple or
Samsung then you're not
gonna be particularly eloquent about the evils of
broad software patents except
insofar as you can find a technical fault in the
specific patent in
question.
The world would be a nicer place without patents like Apples
"double-
tap-to-zoom" or Samsung's "use an App while playing music", but
it was not this particular Jury's job to fix the patent system.
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