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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 02 2013 @ 10:45 AM EDT |
PJ's exactly right. I think I would use a stronger word than
reluctance, however. For (almost) all practical purposes,
the law treats the jury like a black box. You feed the trial
into the black box (the jury) and it spits out a result (the
verdict), and the law doesn't inquire how the sausage was
made (there are extremely rare circumstance, like in all
things in the law, that are exceptions).
In short, once the jury reaches its decision, the judge (and
the appellate court) doesn't look at how this jury reached
its decision, but instead determines if *any reasonable
jury* (aka the abstract jury) could have reached the same
decision.
So, for example, let's say the jury went back and totally
screwed up the deliberations. They ignore crucial evidence
and decide the issue based on the equivalent of a coin flip.
Too bad. So long as the output (verdict) was something that
could be supported by the evidence adduced at trial (aka, a
reasonable jury could have arrived at the verdict the crazy
jury did, using the evidence produced at trial), then you
can't attack the jury's finding. You can still appeal for
all sorts of reasons as a matter of law. But you can't
appeal on the basis of the jury "doing it wrong", unless the
error is apparent on the face of the verdict (an example of
this would be if, say, the plaintiff failed to produce
something into evidence that was necessary for the jury to
reach the verdict they did, or as in this case, if the math
wasn't right).
But PJ's right in the other aspects- and there are good
reasons for the rule that jury deliberations are kept from
collateral attack. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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