California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roundup cancer trial

Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by civility on Monday May 13, 2019 @08:36PM (#19905600)

> Luckily, lay people are qualified to make those judgments. 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.

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.

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by antman on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @01:39AM (#19907030)

>My company was defending, and the plaintiffs dismissed every juror who had anything more than a high school degree.

Your problem appears to be that you had a biased jury rather than a comment for trials by jury in general

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by omginternets on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @07:05AM (#19908424)

His point is that the bias is systemic.

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by keymone on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @02:18AM (#19907207)

The jury is always biased by design. It’s never a goal to make the jury objective and/or competent, ever.

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by adventist on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @02:35AM (#19907281)

I thought both sides get to pick who is on the Jury?

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by civility on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @02:43AM (#19907311)

I'm not sure how much the rules vary, but in our case there were 18 candidate jurors and both sides were allowed to dismiss 3 without cause or justification. Additionally, if either side could argue there was a cause, additional jurors could be dismissed (requiring new jurors to be summoned), but that didn't happen. The plaintiffs removed the 3 with any college at all.

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by regularfry on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @04:36AM (#19907773)

Is the problem not that only 3 out of 18 had college-level education? That seems like a very low number.

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by kamarg on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @11:22AM (#19910404)

That could be a representative sample of the area the trial was held in. Trial by jury of your peers means that some juries will be composed of mostly and sometimes even all "peers" with less formal education that most would think appropriate for the subject matter being discussed.

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by keymone on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @04:11AM (#19907680)

Right and both sides try to make the jury as biased as possible. trying to select for objectiveness is harmful.

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by UnFleshedOne on Thursday May 16, 2019 @11:34AM (#19929942)

Harmful to the side doing the picking or harmful to the justice process in general?

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Re:California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roun... by keymone on Friday May 17, 2019 @03:02AM (#19937010)

i would argue, both

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