Word: casefully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...exhibits. After deliberating for 19 more days, it could not reach a unanimous verdict. Federal Judge Samuel Conti declared a mistrial. He then ruled in favor of IBM, though the jury had favored Memorex by 9 to 2. Suspecting that the jurors were baffled by the whole case, Judge Conti began asking them questions about the evidence. The answers were confused. Declaring that "the magnitude and complexity of the present lawsuit render it as a whole beyond the ability and competency of any jury to understand and decide rationally," Conti ruled that if the case had to be retried...
...appeal, Memorex is what is known as a "big case": a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that involves mountains of evidence and may take months or years to resolve. Increasingly common, such civil cases pose a dilemma. They are generally within the broad definition given by the U.S. Supreme Court to "Suits at common law." Thus they come under the jury-trial guarantee of the Seventh Amendment. (State courts are not bound by the Seventh, but most states have similar guarantees.) Such cases add to the burdens on the already overloaded courts. More important, if the jury cannot understand the issues...
...jury actually selected [for a big case] is rarely a true cross section," said Burger in a speech to state chief justices. "Overwhelmingly, a great many of the people best qualified to sit on juries are those most eager to escape jury duty." Usually they succeed. With excuses ranging from "bad sleeping habits" to "poor frame of mind," every potential juror who did not want to sit through the Memorex case was excused. There were 118 in all. In many long cases, anyone who cannot get away from work for months at a time or who earns more than jury...
...parties to a civil case have the option of waiving their right to a jury and trying the case before a judge. So why do many lawyers choose to try complex cases before a jury? "Usually it's because they think they have a weak case that they couldn't win before a judge," says New York Lawyer David Boies, who defended IBM in one of its many antitrust suits...
Appointing special "blue ribbon" juries made up of people with technical or business training is one way around the problem, though it would probably face constitutional challenges because such jurors are not randomly chosen from the population. A better solution in lengthy cases might be for judges to stop excusing anyone who wants to avoid jury duty. Many lawyers and judges alike are wary of doing away with juries altogether in big cases. Judges have their own biases; at least juries offer what Los Angeles Lawyer Maxwell M. Blecher calls "a bouillabaisse of public viewpoints." These are worth hearing...