Having been on a federal jury for a gun running charge, I can't even begin to describe how difficult that moment is when the future of someone's life is in your hands. I think the maximum penalty was only 7 years, but even that is enough for you to question every shread of evidence both sides presented.
However you /DO/ need to understand prior art to rule in a patent dispute. There's no escaping that.
Technically minded people like us often bitch about how the mass media publish misleading "facts" (and often complete fallacies) due to their lack of technical understanding. Yet here we have a jury ignorantly making billion dollar decisions.
It's a bit like asking a group of hair dressers to officially confirm or deny whether CERN's "faster than light" neutrinos were a calculation error or not.
I don't know if you intended that to be comforting, but I really can't see it that way.
And that is even if I ignore my suspicion (hope?) that the average juror will tread with more care if they are considering the life of another person, than if they are considering a corporation's money.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty#...
The problem is that this case wasn't really about Samsung, and it wasn't really about a few companies, or the fine. This was a high profile case about a broken IP system, a rogue gorilla and an outcome that stifles innovation in the technical arena (not just smartphones). You don't think someone will think twice before even going near Apple again, regardless of the validity (or prior art) of the patent? I am incredulous that anyone could have come to the conclusion of this juror, particularly someone with a tech background.
Hopefully, this won't be the last battle that could turn this madness around.
And Googorola and Samsung are the real rogues with their FRAND abuse.
Part of where this juries judgement seems to have come from is the sense that Samsung was copying more than they felt appropriate. I know that this might not be quite legally the correct approach but maybe it is the strength of using a jury that they can balance a total judgement rather than just summing individual damages.
The file sharing copyright judgements may be more sensible if a jury decided the damages.
Given the numbers of phones Samsung is selling the per device fine isn't that high. Compared to copyright infringement statutory damages in files sharing cases the amounts are tiny.
Edit to add:
Some fair points were made in replies about the complexity of the patent law compared with criminal/murder cases but the parent to this was commenting the scale of the damages decided rather than complexity and that was the focus of my comment.
Yes it is scary but I'm not sure I can think of less scary options for really serious criminal cases.