Samsung/Apple Jury Foreman Shows He Doesn't Understand Prior Art

Re:Samsung/Apple Jury Foreman Shows He Doesn't Understand Pr... by pfedor on Friday August 31, 2012 @05:21PM (#4461747)

That's how our justice system works. I'm glad that any citizen gets to be on a jury rather than some elite set of experts. We can't have it both ways. If given the choice between "experts" and average citizens on a jury I'd go with average citizens every time. I don't care how dumb or smart they are. What I care about is if we decide that a certain kind of person should be on certain juries then that creates a new kind of class system and would hurt us more than help.

You could apply the same argument to any other kind of task. "If we decide that a certain kind of person should perform certain surgeries then that creates a new kind of class system and would hurt us more than help." So, if jury trials are a good thing, that's not for the reason you gave, since you obviously wouldn't want random people to perform heart surgeries or design bridges.

I don't know that the current system does much for equality either. For example, back when I used to read reddit there were a lot of stories about how black people are disproportionately likely to be convicted of crimes in the U.S. So if that's true, you can't help but wonder, maybe trained experts could be trained to be more color-blind than an average citizen.

Have you seen the movie "Twelve angry men"? It becomes much less uplifting once you realize that in the real life it will be just like that except there may be no Henry Fonda in the room.

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Re:Samsung/Apple Jury Foreman Shows He Doesn't Understand Pr... by bpatrianakos on Friday August 31, 2012 @06:33PM (#4461962)

You can't train someone to be impartial. There are problems with the juries and the court system but specially selecting juries isn't going to solve it. Jurors are supposd to be impartial and if this case had an expert jury they'd bring with them their own experiences with the patent system both positive and negative. So I'm a developer. Suppose I get called into jury duty and it's a case of some company suing a developer for checking an email account they set up for a client and the prosecution is arguing that the developer was in the wrong for doing so without permission. And let's say the reason for doing this was to verify that some transactional email accounts were working or to click an activation link for some peripheral service. Yeah, it's a way out there weird example but try not to get hung up on the details and stay with me on the bigger picture. As an expert juror I'm inclined to side with the defendant because I know how frustrating it is to work with clueless people and wait forever to get things done and I've created email addresses for people before and gone in there real quick for the exact same reason. Objectively what was done was wrong but in my mind it's justified. So I side with the defendant, persuade the other jurors and get the guy off the hook. The point is that experts are arguably more biased than anyone. A doctor being sued for malpractice with an all doctor jury will have lots of friends on the jury who will probably side with him having most likely feared or dealt with malpractice suits their whole career. That's why I like the idea of lay people getting the facts from expert testimony. You also can't train people to be color blind. If I told you not to notice someone's skin color it would just draw attention to it. Once something has been said or seen it cannot be unheard or unseen. America is a racist country, most jurors are white and middle class, and that's why you see more blacks being convicted than whites.

It's a messy issue with no perfect solution so non-experts are the best solution so far.

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Re:Samsung/Apple Jury Foreman Shows He Doesn't Understand Pr... by CamperBob2 on Friday August 31, 2012 @09:21PM (#4462355)

You can't train someone to be impartial.

Really? Why not? Do you have any citations to back this up?

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Re:Samsung/Apple Jury Foreman Shows He Doesn't Understand Pr... by fakeer on Saturday September 01, 2012 @12:31AM (#4462660)

if this case had an expert jury they'd bring with them their own experiences with the patent system both positive and negative

How come? In a case where it's important to know whether a patent was infringed upon or not (call it a technical thingie happened or not) it's very important that the very facts and formulas behind this were needed to be carefully understood by people who gave the verdict(I am not aware of the USA jury system other than explained by Hollywood).

Atleast they could have seen what a patent farce war it was. Now all they might have done was "Oh yeah.. looks like Samsung copied Apple.."..another "..yeah..seems like that..hmm you are right".. "a billion dollar will be fine..no?".. "yeah...that's perfect.. let them pay a billion dollar".. or whatever happens inside there.

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