Having been through a jury trial for patent infringement, I saw nothing of the sort. My company was defending, and the plaintiffs dismissed every juror who had anything more than a high school degree. They were incapable of understanding any nuance in the engineering or math, and so they sided for the home team (the plaintiffs managed to get jurisdiction in their home town).
If you like, call it sour grapes because my company was on the losing side, but I think the majority of jurors are completely unequipped to understand basic science, mathematics, engineering, software, medicine, or technology.
Your problem appears to be that you had a biased jury rather than a comment for trials by jury in general
It's not clear that they're competent to do this, either.
>If lay people are not equipped to evaluate such credibility, that calls into question the very underpinnings of our policy-making institutions.
Not necessarily. It just calls into question whether the system works well in this class of cases.
>Whenever I have seen an actual jury at work, I have consistently been impressed by the degree to which folks can absorb the information presented at trial.
Have you seen something even remotely comparable to the case being discussed here?
The tobacco cases come to mind.
Just because they happened to make the right choice doesn't make them competent. A broken clock is right twice a day.
So let me get this right...you don’t think a jury can comprehend and understand the facts being presented to them through experts, yet without hearing any facts or experts you can confirm these juries “made the right choice”?
As I said before there will be educated people in this thread who down play a juries ability to make a accurate finding of fact and yet be all to happy to make their own findings without any knowledge of the facts of a given case or expert testimony, just as you did.
Yes. It's possible to make a good decision through a flawed process.
I don't know where you're getting the idea that I endorse autocratic rulers, but it's absurd and borderline inflammatory.
What's the alternative, though?
Perhaps both lawyers could be allowed to negotiate requirements for the jurors (e.g. they must have a technical background, at least half must have college degrees, etc.). Or perhaps each lawyer negotiates requirements for some of the jurors with the judge.
Another approach would be to make changes to the legal system. For example:
Make it illegal for a lawyer to present evidence that they know to be scientifically or technologically unsound or to present a witness that they know to be unqualified.
Make it perjury for an expert witness to knowingly present scientifically unsound statements or to comment on something that they are unqualified for.
Make unsound science valid grounds for overturning or appealing a case.
Require statements to be backed by data that meets statistical requirements.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure these wouldn't be a perfect solution, but perhaps they would help.
The issue is, experts genuinely don’t agree on much of anything. Is salt bad for your blood pressure? Many medical doctors would say yes, many would say no. There is almost no subject where you can’t find highly qualified experts that have conflicting opinions.
Some such systems, such as the one in Germany, don't have "jury of your peers," but a panel of professional jurists who act as both judge and jury.
I'm curious why you think it allows for more corruption than the US system. Something I find compelling about the German system is that the primary point is not to decide guilt or innocence of the accused, but to determine the truth. (See https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ilj/vol34/iss2/5/).
Plea bargaining in the US is, in my opinion, a corrupt practice.
> I'm curious why you think it allows for more corruption than the US system.
I didn't make that claim in the big picture, I was talking specifically about the the role of jurors in terms of evaluating the credibility of expert testimony.
My concern with the idea of "professional jurors" is that they represent an easy target for corruption in the form of coercion, bribery, etc. How can you ensure that a professional juror is actually impartial and fair? If jurors are always coming from the same pool of people, won't they develop relationships with prosecutors and the like that may influence their impartiality?
Panels and government oversight boards are just another easy target for lobbying (in all of its various flavors). As though the US system doesn't have enough of those corruption points in place now. There are an enormous number of jury cases in the US every year however, and bribery is rare.
If you replace traditional juries with expert panels, it's guaranteed that the system will be designed - by those that benefit from all other forms of lobbying - to have holes in it that allow forms of legal lobbying and influence, whether direct or indirect.
I'll take juries of The People in all regards, and without exception, over the extraordinarily dangerous, anti-democratic risks involved in shifting the system toward elitist expert panels. We already have enough of that shit dominating our country as it is. I choose the less perfect system - if that's indeed the choice - that retains power in the people broadly, keeping a critically important piece of the justice system mass-involved - something we're all part of.
I disagree with the outcome of this case and leaving scientific decisions in the hands of people who may not have the cogitative skills to make the best assessments is an issue and would like see a solution. That being said, the moral hazards you point out do appear to be a much larger potential issue and I agree the risks of "expert panels" probably aren't worth it. We need some sort of redress to non biased citizens.
Perhaps civil trials with monetary rewards are a different matter than criminal trials though, not sure. Anyway, your point is good.
The system isn't set up to answer or ask the question "did it specifically cause this cancer", because that question is known to be unanswerable.
That seems decidable.
- The age-adjusted baseline rate of a particular type of cancer is, say, 1%.
- An age-adjusted 2.5% of people in an afflicted community have been diagnosed with this type of cancer. This is a huge increase above baseline.
- By implication, of people in the community with a diagnosis of this type of cancer, 40% of them would have cancer anyway for reasons unrelated to whatever is being sued over, and 60% of them got it "because" of whatever the problem is.
It isn't possible to make any distinction between those groups at the level of an individual case. There's no difference in the cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGhee_v_National_Coal_Board
Your jurisdiction might deal with things differently, but this case has had international adoption, as the framework deals with scientific uncertainty fairly elegantly.
I'm curious how you draw this conclusion. While many substances may not, with 100% reproduction rates, cause a particular response there can be a majority that happens when excessive or improper exposure happens. If you're saying the question is unanswerable because it's not 100% guaranteed you'll get cancer, but say 67% chance then that's proof it did cause cancer in the subset. In this case it appears there has been suppressed study data which points directly to the outcome which brings into question, for the jury, the morality of the organization selling the product which are likely influencing reference points for a jury.
Did a certain specific person get cancer due to exposure to a chemical? Typically you can only assert that their risk of cancer increased, which makes the answer essentially unknowable.
Which is not to say that they shouldn't be held liable for this sort of thing, but a bunch of jury trials for individual cases probably isn't a great way to do it.
Billions of dollars, yes. In cases of government vs company. Or a class action. But I don't think HN or anyone reasonable was ever in favor of billion dollar judgments in matters that ten thousands of also effected claimants trying to get the same.
Isn’t that the point being made?
Frankly I don’t see how juries can possibly be expected to weigh two expert opinions espousing statistical whatever’s. I can force a statistical argument either way, and if you don’t have both a background in the area and time to dig through assumptions you’re gonna have a hard time knowing if I’m right.
I think most would be ok with this reasoning behind punitive damages, as long as lawyers representing victims cannot collect more than, say 1.2 mln $USD (or some large multiple of a minimal wage).
Otherwise, the obscene punitive damages are transferred as insurance cost, baked into pharma costs, and covered exclusively by US consumers.
Yes and yes.
That it does, but that doesn't in turn mean that lay people are equipped to evaluate such credibility. I can't help but browse social media, watch the news, or interact with people in my town without questioning the general ability to evaluate credibility.
Gee. Who would have thought that giving an equal voice to people on both sides of the bell curve would lead to any other outcome than what we're seeing?
(Answer: a lot of smart people thought that. Were they right?)
> The insurers had medical doctors closely examine the medical records in cases involving claims of medical negligence to determine if medical negligence had occurred. Tarragin et al. [31] compared these judgments with verdicts rendered by juries if the case went to trial. The jury verdicts tended to be consistent with the medical judgments.
> Those authors found that the jury verdicts favored the hospital in all cases that the hospital had rated as not-negligent.
Would those articles' findings also be consistent with the following hypotheses?
(1) Physicians tend to give their colleagues the benefit of the doubt, applying empathy and excusing neglect in borderline cases of negligence.
(2) Hospitals tend to issue findings of negligence which protect their employees, preferring to retain staff with otherwise positive job performance in borderline cases of negligence.
(3) Juries tend to trust the opinions of hospitals and doctors who say that other doctors were not negligent, more than they tend to trust experts who say the opposite.
> If this claim is valid, an ideal study would be to compare the judgments of medical doctors to the verdicts rendered by juries. A study by Taragin et al. [31] did just that. The study utilized data from the closed claim files of a medical liability insurer. The insurers had medical doctors closely examine the medical records in cases involving claims of medical negligence to determine if medical negligence had occurred. Tarragin et al. [31] compared these judgments with verdicts rendered by juries if the case went to trial. The jury verdicts tended to be consistent with the medical judgments. Moreover, the study found that verdicts were not related to the severity of the injury suffered by the plaintiff, an indication that juries were not basing their judgment out of mere sympathy for a seriously injured patient. Farber and White [13] also compared jury verdicts to hospital records bearing on negligence. Those authors found that the jury verdicts favored the hospital in all cases that the hospital had rated as not-negligent.
The billion-dollar punitive damages verdict, moreover, is not crazy considering that the point of punitive damages is to deter similar conduct in the future. If you look at what folks here on HN--presumably quite knowledgeable about the subject matter--were saying about how much Facebook should be fined to deter conduct like that which led to the Cambridge Analytica issues, the numbers were likewise in the billions of dollars.