I’ve done cases involving small rural hospitals. We always have our experts make a point of explaining what the standard of care would be for a doctor in such an institution. In fact, I like to get an expert with that kind of background. My guess is that the plaintiff’s attorney and experts in the case in question did make that point, but the jurors just felt it “wasn’t fair.”
Thanks. If it happens again – I hope it doesn’t – I will do this. I was really po’d.
Bingo. This was one of the available options the physician failed to take. There was also a simple test that could have been performed to determine if the young man was in danger. The physician – a GP – didn’t do that, either.
As I said, the doctor acknowledged his negligence in settlement negotiations. It was the insurance company that wouldn’t settle, in the hope that they wouldn’t get dinged as hard in a trial as in a settlement. I doubt they expected to do that well, though.
Doesn’t work here. You are supposed to show up for jury duty at 9 am. If you aren’t there by 11 am, they send a squad car out to look for you.
This obviously wouldn’t work in a big city where the police are too busy to spend time on things like this, but in our small town, the police have the time to track you down. IIRC, the punishment is a fine of up to $500 and up to 10 days in jail. I believe most offenders only get a fine.
Apology in advance for a long post.
I have served on one jury, and I hope it was my last. This was about 1990 or thereabouts. The case was somewhat groundbreaking, in that it was the first time in the state of Kansas that a husband was accused of raping his wife. (The law had been changed a year or two earlier; before then, a husband could not be charged with the rape of his wife.) To complicate matters somewhat, she was white and he was black. While a mixed-race marriage isn’t as uncommon as it used to be, 30 years ago it was still somewhat of an anomaly in small-town Kansas. We were asked during the selection process if we could handle a rape case, and if we had a problem with a mixed marriage. Several members of the pool excused themselves on one or both of these reasons. Everybody else on the jury assured the judge that neither of these would be an issue.
The alleged rape occurred when the couple was separated and she had filed for divorce. He came to see her and said he wanted to talk, but didn’t want to do so in front of the kids. So he convinced her to go a drive in the country, where he stopped the car, told her that he’d harm her if she didn’t cooperate, and proceeded to commit the act.
Afterward, he took her home and told her to keep quiet, but she immediately called the cops. She had to go to the police station and have a rape test performed by a local doctor while two male cops were present in the room. Shortly thereafter he was arrested and charged.
Although there were several other witnesses, the case essentially came down to her testimony versus his. Hers was extremely believable and graphic, even describing how he had ripped out her tampon before raping her. His contention was that yes, they had sex, but it was consensual, and they ‘made love’ two or three times before he took her home. (The ‘two or three times’ quote helped convince every male juror, including me, that he was guilty as hell.)
Jury selection had taken all morning, and the trial began in the afternoon. It adjourned for the day after a couple of hours and resumed the next morning. We received the case shortly after lunch and began deliberations.
I was ready to vote immediately and expressed a desire to do so, but others wanted to discuss the case. We finally took a vote after talking for a couple of hours. The vote was 11-1 in favor of a guilty verdict. We soon learned who the holdout was (she told us), and another juror asked her why she voted Not Guilty. Her reasoning was that the victim’s testimony wasn’t believable and she (the victim) was out to get her husband in trouble. I then asked her something like “Do you think that she would have suffered the humiliation of having to get swabbed in front of two male cops just to get her husband in trouble?” To which the holdout replied “Well, she had already humiliated herself by marrying a black man.”
I immediately replied that she had informed the judge and attorneys that she didn’t have a problem with a mixed-race marriage, and that if she felt that way, we (the jury) needed to tell the judge, who would probably declare a mistrial. After some more discussion, we took another vote and it was 12-0.
That experience completely soured me on the jury process, and I really hope I don’t ever have to serve again. I also hope that my fate is never in the hands of 12 people, any one of whom could be as prejudiced as this woman was.
Several years later, I was again in a jury pool and my name was drawn. When the judge asked me if I had ever served on a jury, I gave him a brief recount of my experience, and told him it would definitely affect my ability to be fair and impartial. The DA excused me, and I haven’t been called since.
I also have been such an advocate. I firmly believe that a juror from, say, Louisville, would be much more impartial in a case in NYC than a native New Yorker, and vice versa.
Plus, after my jury experience described above, I’m even more adamant for professional jurors.
Can I offer a different perspective?
Your deliberative process worked. Not as you expected, but it did work. You and your fellow jurors were able to convince this rogue juror that they had made a mistake in misrepresenting their state of mind to the judge, and it garnered a good result. Messy? You bet. But it worked.
Did you have alternate jurors available? Because if you all had reported the transgression of the rogue juror to the judge, I expect she would have been expelled and an alternate brought in for you to begin your deliberations anew. Probably not a mistrial unless no alternates were available.
Anyway, something to think about. Our judicial system needs people like you who are willing to be honest in voir dire, hear cases carefully and deliberate as they are instructed to do. I hope you will reconsider your experience and classify it as a success – however unpleasant it was. We’re not getting professional jurors anytime soon, I’m afraid.
In the end, I suppose it did. But I think that she may have changed her vote in part because she was hopelessly outnumbered, not because she thought the defendant was guilty.
No, not that I recall.
Oh, if I get called again to jury duty, I’ll show up. I’m retired and I only live two blocks from the courthouse!
Can’t ask for more than that. 
Yes, i work in the insurance industry, and i more often hear people bemoaning miscarriages of justice against the insurance company, but I’m sure it happens both ways. For instance, i recently heard of a case where there was a minor collision that did not leave a dent in either car. The plaintiff, however, had a compression fracture in his spine and an infection, which he claimed were the result of the accident. It eventually came out that the infection was from his illegal drug use and dirty needles. I assume the compression fracture was something he had before the cars tapped each other, too. But the case took a couple of years before it came to trial and a jury awarded the guy a few million dollars.
Someone else with a real injury got nothing. It’s all a crap shoot, and too much depends on who is on the jury and whether the judge is hungry.
Maybe criminal cases should be tried by juries to rein in the power of the state. I believe that civil cases (which are between two private parties) would be better handled by experts, such as the panel of judges many countries use.
I’ve been called a bunch of times, and have been empaneled three times.
The first was a case of two counts of malicious mischief (i.e. vandalism). A young woman had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend, and it got so heated that she fled her apartment. When she returned she found the place had been trashed, with personal belongings destroyed, including a stereo that had been thrown off a balcony. The defendant admitted to throwing the stereo, but claimed it was his property. He said he left after throwing the stereo and didn’t close the door behind him, so someone else must have gotten in and done all the other damage later. His explanation seemed ridiculous to me, but other jurors weren’t so sure. The decision finally came down to his testimony that he had given the girlfriend the stereo as a gift, so it actually wasn’t his property. We found him guilty on that count. On the second count, there was so little evidence that we found him not guilty.
The second trial was for one count of assault with a deadly weapon. Two groups of people had gotten into an argument over whether someone owed someone else $5 for a phono cartridge. They took the fight outside. One of the people punched out another, at which point the defendant (the girlfriend of the guy who had just been punched out) came up and touched the puncher in the side. The puncher said, “The bitch stabbed me.” He was rushed to the hospital where emergency surgery was performed (the wound was deep enough to puncture his liver). At some point the knife was found on the gurney, but no prints were found on it. The defendant admitted to owning a knife, but couldn’t produce it, and said that the one in evidence was different from hers. We deliberated a couple of days until finding the defendant guilty. After thinking about it a long time, I decided there was no other reasonable explanation for how the stabbing could have taken place.
The third case was one count of credit card fraud and one count of grand theft embezzlement. The defendant was an employee at a local Target. They had video surveillance of her keying in credit card numbers to buy gift cards that she stowed under the counter. They also had footage of her when a person brought merchandise to the register, where instead of taking payment from the person, she keyed in a stolen credit card number. We found her guilty on both counts, though there was one guy on the jury who was hard to convince. That juror seemed not to understand basic things, like what a gift card is, and that someone can break two laws with a single act.
The evidence in the last case was interesting. The point-of-sale system used by the store has fraud detection built into it. One of the things they look for is a credit card being swiped (this was in the days before chips), and the same credit card number being keyed in later the same day. That’s one of the things the defendant was doing - using the card numbers of customers she had checked out earlier in the day to place fraudulent charges. It’s what made the Target security people suspicious of her, and why they put her under surveillance.
The prosecution also had a witness who testified that he had received a Target credit card in the mail, but decided he didn’t want it, so he cut it up without ever using it. The defendant used that card number to place a charge. They never explained how she got the number, but it sounded like there was a theft ring operating in Target (or possibly in the bank that issued the cards). In any case, it didn’t matter. The defendant made charges to an account that didn’t belong to her.
You may be surprised to hear that it’s overwhelmingly the defendant in civil cases that demands a jury trial. Plaintiffs (around here anyway) often set it for a judge trial, and the defendants (Insurance companies) ask for a jury. They think jurors are more skeptical of plaintiffs’ claims. (Like everything else, there are exceptions. We favor jury trials for insurance disputes, for example.)
This was exactly the calculus made by the insurance company in the case I described.
It was an open secret in our court that insurance companies often took cases to a jury in our courts, because “juries always defense in this county.” And it was true.
If juries didn’t outright find for the defense, judgments were often for less than what had been sought by the plaintiff. Which, in California, is deemed a loss to the plaintiff. If the trial resulted in a judgment for less than what was sought, the plaintiff was responsible for attorneys’ fees and costs of the defense. Also true if the verdict resulted in an award less than what was offered during settlement negotiations.
I was called for jury duty once, but it’s a very boring story. I completely forgot about it until a few days after I was supposed to show up, but that was right around the time everything started shutting down because of covid. I never heard anything more about it.
Emphasis mine, because at least in the courts where I worked, it was exactly for the purpose of encouraging those employers to start paying for jury service. I often saw judges I worked for calling employers in the area to discuss the issue and let them know the importance of granting at least a few days of paid leave to their employees specifically for jury service.
Been called up three times. First time, dismissed at prelim stage. Second time, made it upstairs, sent home when they found out I was a musician. Third time, was granted dismissal as all the perfumes and colognes gave me a monster headache which was only going to get worse. If I had been single, I might have tried courting the judge, she was a sweetheart. The end.
Bigger issue for some people is that employers will tell you to get out of jury duty by hook or by crook. Whether you get paid or not is almost secondary.
A prior boss of mine would say that anyone who was too stupid to get out of jury duty during quarter close (Accounting & Finance busy time) was too stupid to work there. Sure enough the sheriff came to pick up someone in Accounting who decided that not showing up for work on July 1 was more detrimental to her than blowing off a jury summons. She had deferred her Jan 3 summons, so she had no flexibility.
Of course the manager swore he had never threatened to fire anyone. He was just expressing an opinion.
BTW, when I served, I was trying to figure out what to wear. Like most people, I dress very casually but a T-shirt and jeans seemed inappropriate, but a suit seemed like overkill. (Though I saw more business suits in the courthouse than anywhere else in town.) And I also wondered if I’d get chilly. I think I ended up wearing sweaters every day. I also wondered if I’d get drowsy, sitting there for hours in the jury box. I never fell asleep but I did bite my cheek a couple of times to wake myself up.
Been called for jury duty 5 times over the years, the last 3 in a 2 year period. The first was back in the 80’s, a man was accused of sexually assaulting his Korean bride. He had forced himself on her multiple times. He was found guilty, she just wanted to go back to South Korea.
The second was in 2003. A guy shot another in the knee in a dispute over a girl. This was the young prosecutor’s first case and she appeared lost more than once. The defense attorney was an older woman that had just been reinstated by the bar, she had been disbarred for having a relationship with a client. During the trial she called this former client as an expert witness. Before deliberations I was one of the two selected as an alternate juror and sent home. It ended with a hung jury. About 4 months later the defendant was arrested for murder.
The next 3 came in a short period. All jurors were excused because of Covid the first time. The next time I was excused for a medical condition. The last time I was excused because my FIL is a retired cop. In that case a police officer was charged with assault.
We kept our courtrooms deliberately chilly, and as you may suspect, it was to aid in keeping everyone awake – judge and staff included. I never struggled with sleepiness, but many did.
I remember one jury trial when the jury had complained about how cold the courtroom was, so we boosted the temperature. After a lengthy trial, the judge was reading the final instructions to the jury. This happened to take place just after lunch.
Our court reporter, a very experienced one, could take down the reading of jury instructions in her sleep. Literally. She tapped at her machine as her eyes closed and her head lolled back and forth as she fought to stay awake. The jury was transfixed. The judge was busy reading, so he didn’t notice the drama playing out in front of him.
Suddenly, the court reporter started awake and suffered a hypnic jerk. Her right leg shot up and her fashionable heel flew off her foot and did a lazy arc before landing next to the jury box. For the next several minutes, she pounded furiously at her machine, then scuttled a few inches toward her shoe, then pounded, then scuttled. Eventually, she retrieved her shoe.
I don’t think that jury heard a word the judge said.