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It is a movie after all - a figment of someone's imagination | 119 comments | Create New Account
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It is a movie after all - a figment of someone's imagination
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 02 2012 @ 09:38 AM EDT

Is it possible for a Jury to see the harm in the Law? Certainly.

But it's also possible for a Jury to decide a 6 year old shoplifter should get the death penalty.

Checks and balances Must exist - even upon the normally sacrosanct decisions of a Jury. When you end up with an entity (of which a Jury can be considered) with ultimate power and no checks and balances you end up with a situation where extreme harm and extreme injustice can occur.

The Jury in the Apple vs Samsung case decided to:

    1) Ignore the Jury Instructions
This is clear from the very first Jury Instruction that the Jury was only supposed to consider evidence as available in the trial - not externally brought to the trial.
    2) Write their own Laws
This is clear from the Jury deciding to award sufficient damages to be a deterrent. The Law was outlined in the Jury Instructions and the Jury was clearly only supposed to find for actual proven damages.

In my humble opinion - if one is going to decide the given Law is wrong, then one must decide in favor of the benefit of the greater Society. This is an extreme choice one is making and as a result one should be erring on the extreme side of caution.

There is no valid reason to ignore a non-extreme Law such as:

    Only actual proven damages can be awarded.
While the writers of 12 Angry Men may have authored a situation where it "looks good on paper" that a Jury went their own route in finding Justice - the reality of having that applied in real life tends to be very different. And it is very different for the simple fact that no human is perfect and every human is prone to commit errors.

Just my humble opinions on both the Law and Human Character.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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