We just settled the case…it was a civil case (sexual harassment); we found for the defendents. After the decision the judge (female) came in to talk to us-she told us that had we found for the plaintiff, she would have overturned us.
Now the details; the plaintiff’s lawyer appeared to be young and inexperienced. She asked a lot of leading questions, and yet appeared to have forgotten that you don’t ask questions of a witness who is favoring the other side. The plaintiff was also a problem-she could not recall dates, or even remember giving a deposition. My question; this lawsuit was filed about 3 years ago, and related to incidents that happened in 1997, and 2001. Isn’t it a stretch to expect witnesses to remember specific details from so long ago? It didn’t seem to me, to fit the description of a speedy trial.
Anyway, I felt basically pretty sad: the plaintiff lost, her lawyer lost, and the defendents paid a bundle to their lawyer. lawsuits are expensive!
The two are mutually exclusive.
So, why were you and the other jurors there?
Good question; i suppose the judge had allowed the trial to proceed, even though there would be no doubt about the outcome. There were just NO hard facts presented that would prove the assertions. We were asked to award dmages 9if we found the defendents guilty of sexual harassment). But there were no pays stubs, income tax returns, etc. Absolutely nothing except what the plaintiff told us she earned. So there was no basis for determining damages. ac disaster from the beginning.
What a waste of time and money.
I got called for a criminal trial my husband was going to be testifying in, but until they called me into that particular court room, I couldn’t get out of jury duty.
I would certainly feel I had wasted my time if the judge had said something like that.
One of my friends worked as a ticket-taker at the local bargain cinemas one summer, and, getting ready to go off to work one day he was feeling particularly lazy. “There’s nothing quite like knowing that your job can be replaced by a sign that says ‘Take tickets to concession stand’ to make you feel useful,” he said.
I would surmise that the judge made her decision After hearing the testimony, so it wasn’t really predictable that you were wasting your time.
See, this is why I get in Trouble With Authority.
If the judge can change the jury’s decision, why do we have jurys? All we need is judges. This one anyway seems to believe that she knows better than the jury.
No they aren’t.
Where the OP seems to be confused is in applying the notion of a speedy trial to civil matters. There is no guarantee of a speedy trial in civil matters; only criminal defendants have the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.
Sometimes juries make mistakes. Sometimes the issues in a trial appeal to the emotions of the jury and they make their decisions based on their emotions instead of the relevant facts and laws. The judge is there in those instances to fix it when the jury gets it wrong. The vast majority of jury trials are left to the jury with the judge only very rarely setting aside the verdict. Without knowing exactly what the judge said, it sounds like she was praising this jury for a job well done.
I’ll just drop it. 
Just a couple of points.
Civil trials, trials between private persons and not cases instigated by the government claiming the commission of a crime, can be very difficult to get to trial. The contest between criminal matters in which there is an imperative to get to trial in a pretty short time, and civil matters that after all just involve property and money and it is unlikely that one of the parties is rotting in jail in a pretrial confinement status, when there is a contest for the use of the same judges and the same court rooms, the civil cases are all too often bumped so that a short-fuse criminal case can be disposed of. This means that even if everyone involved in a civil case wants to get to trial sometimes they can’t. In the contest between trying a civil case and trying a criminal case the criminal case has priority. Once the criminal cases are disposed of and out of the way there is a priority between civil cases. For instance, in this state a contested child custody divorce has priority over other civil matters. In the end conventional civil matters are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to scheduling a trial.
This is complected by the tendency of some defendants to delay and delay and delay and discover and discover and discover in the hope that the plaintiff will get frustrated and give up or run out of money – this incidentally might be thought to be the reason that there was such a hue and cry by major liability insurers about doing away with contingency representation some years ago under the guise of tort reform.
In any conventional civil case the presiding judge has the power to take a case away from the jury at the close of the plaintiff’s case, at the end of the trial and when the jury returns a verdict if the judge finds that the evidence is such that no rational jury could rule in favor of the plaintiff. This can be done by a directed verdict before the jury takes the case or by the entry of a judgement notwithstanding the verdict after the jury’s verdict is announced. There are similar procedures to have a verdict entered in favor of the plaintiff after the jury’s verdict is announced by ordering a new trial unless the defendant agrees to pony up – the rational is the same, that the evidence was such that a rational jury would not have done what it in fact did. Those are things trial judges hate to do because it is a huge pain and a lot of work for everybody and clogs up the system more that it already is. What a judge will often do is let the case go to the jury, reserving ruling on motions for directed verdict, and hope that the jury will do the right thing in the right amount with a minimum of fuss and bother.
The real problems come up when there is some basis for a jury to go either way. The jury’s decision might not be what the judge’s would do if it were at the judge’s sole decision, but that is no basis for throwing out a jury verdict if there was any basis for the jury, taking the evidence in the light most favorable to the prevailing party, to come down the way it did.
Your judge, Ralph, may have been doing no more than saying that the jury came down the same way the judge would have. I have trouble thinking that the judge would have revealed how he would have ruled on a motion for directed verdict or verdict notwithstanding.
First off, ralph124c, on behalf of the lawyers, thank you for serving and reaching a verdict you believed in, after weighing the evidence and considering the parties’ arguments. For those of us who make our living by juries, it’s good to know that people take it as seriously as you did.
Second, I would take the judge’s comment at the end to mean that she agreed with your verdict, and saw the same deficiencies in the plaintiffs’ case that you did. As others have pointed out, judges have a somewhat limited ability to dispose of a case before it reaches verdict. In addition, some judges have difficulty kicking a case if there is even a possibility that equities could weigh with the plaintiff. As a lawyer, of course, that’s often frustrating: we know that there’s little to no evidence to show that the plaintiff has a case, but the judge continues to permit the case to go forward, at great cost to the parties.
Still, you did a good thing. Thanks for serving.
Well thanks for the kind words. As I say, I felt bad for everybody: the woman who brought the suit obviously had had some kind of nervous breakdown. Second, the defendents were subjected to a lotof expenses. The thing just did not help anyone, but thats the breaks, I guess.