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I sat on a civil jury trial between a boilermaker in the Navy that had been exposed to asbestos and developed mesothelioma, and a company that made asbestos ins

I sat on a civil jury trial between a boilermaker in the Navy that had been exposed to asbestos and developed mesothelioma, and a company that made asbestos insulation. Neither side could actually put the man and the company or its insulation in the same room at any point in the past. Lots and lots of companies made this type of insulation. (In an "accidental" outbust from one of the attorneys that we were instructed to ignore, we learned that he was in fact suing most of them.) The Navy kept meticulous records about where he had worked, and both the Navy and the company did the same about work orders and where the insulation had been installed. The best evidence the man had was "I saw their truck in the parking lot once". This type of civil trial only required a 9/12 majority and the other jurors really only saw this as a chance to stick it to the company. "Of course this man should be repaid for the damage done to him!" Any sort of nuance like, "okay sure but should this company be the one to pay it?" was totally lost. He's hurt, so somebody should pay up. That was it. That was their justice. The jury instructions like the actual claims to damages were totally ignored. I sure hope I never have a jury deciding my fate.

dnr 11y ago
I was on a civil trial jury for a very similar situation. Construction worker 30 years ago, exposed to asbestos, lung cancer. Oh, and also a lifelong smoker. Originally sued ~30 companies, whittled down to 3 by the time the trial started, 1 by the time the trial ended, a company that mined asbestos. The striking thing was the degree to which the other jurors seemed to be making decisions based almost completely on emotion and which side told a better and more sympathetic story, with little regard for facts or reason. One of the jurors at one point gave a blatantly incorrect explanation of a simple statement about probabilities, and got angry when I corrected her. The jury ended up awarding a pretty significant amount of money, because the plaintiff was relatively poor and sympathetic, and because the company had acted somewhat shady with regard to knowledge about the dangers of asbestos and warning labels. That's despite the tenuous connection between the asbestos they mined and the asbestos that may have been in his lungs (there was no direct evidence of asbestos in his lungs), and the significant probability that the lung cancer was caused by his smoking and not asbestos at all. The scary part is that I felt like most of the jury was at least trying to do the right thing, using the cognitive tools that they had available to them (mainly empathy and reasoning like "they acted shady so they deserve to be fined"). If people didn't even try, it could have been much worse. As it is, though, I pretty much lost my faith in the jury system.
geomark 11y ago
I feel the same way. The three times I served on a jury were all the same. Very few people bothered to read or try to understand the jury instructions. Few considered the evidence that was presented. Most were utterly clueless, totally lacking the ability to perform any logical reasoning. Most just voted their biases. Although, if you have a sharp attorney he could very well get a hung jury for you even if the evidence is slam dunk for a conviction. He just needs to be really good at jury selection.
- agiamas 11y ago
  these same people are voting for your president or prime minister or MP. If anything, the (unfortunately, long term..) solution is to educate these people, not to abolish jury duty.
  - adrianN 11y ago
    You could also abolish voting. /s
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Good luck with that. We'd have to start with totally remaking news media, or even getting rid of them altogether - it's them who present a new outrage every day with a handy judgement to cache and retrieve the next time you see a similar looking situation. But "free speech!", "free media - the cornerstone of democracy!", something something.
    - derefr 11y ago
      Remove economic incentives from news media, perhaps. You'd think news-organizations-as-charities would work, but even being donation-driven still incentivizes populist pandering at the expense of real journalism. We need something that is to current journalism as the Senate is to the House: unable to be blown around by society's ephemeral tastes. The simplest method is probably to pay for journalism through taxes. The BBC is a decent model. Ideally we'd want to retain a multiplicity of viewpoints, though. Maybe a BBC-alike as a grant-funding organization, where small independent journalist groups get grants to go out and investigate, in exchange for an agreement to publish their stories onto the BBC-alike's news wire service (which would then be freely licensed to distributors—basically putting those stories into the public domain.) Rather than the BBC-alike deciding who to hire, let a Journalist's Guild decide who's good enough to publish; anyone allowed into the profession will be trusted to have done something valuable whenever they submit a story, and will be automatically paid out. It's the Guild's responsibility (i.e. that of the other Guild members) to catch their peers submitting nonsense and report them, and have those people's journalistic credentials suspended or disbar them entirely. That'd neatly realign the concept of "journalistic integrity" or "journalistic ethics" to stand at the same strength-of-force on journalists as the equivalent concepts in medicine and law do for their professionals.
MichaelApproved 11y ago
I almost sat on a similar trial with a similar "accidental" outburst from the defendants lawyers. Did this trial happen to be in Los Angeles?
- ketralnis 11y ago
  San Francisco
visakanv 11y ago
> This type of civil trial only required a 9/12 majority and the other jurors really only saw this as a chance to stick it to the company. "Of course this man should be repaid for the damage done to him!" Any sort of nuance like, "okay sure but should this company be the one to pay it?" was totally lost. He's hurt, so somebody should pay up. That was it. That was their justice. The jury instructions like the actual claims to damages were totally ignored. Most "justice systems" on Earth are really just thinly-veiled vengeance systems, unfortunately.
ckozlowski 11y ago
Civil trials in the U.S.(as opposed to criminal) are an entirely different sort. Google "U.S. Tort Reform" and you'll find treatises on the subject. I agree, it's a total mess.

dnr 11y ago

I was on a civil trial jury for a very similar situation. Construction worker 30 years ago, exposed to asbestos, lung cancer. Oh, and also a lifelong smoker. Originally sued ~30 companies, whittled down to 3 by the time the trial started, 1 by the time the trial ended, a company that mined asbestos. The striking thing was the degree to which the other jurors seemed to be making decisions based almost completely on emotion and which side told a better and more sympathetic story, with little regard for facts or reason. One of the jurors at one point gave a blatantly incorrect explanation of a simple statement about probabilities, and got angry when I corrected her. The jury ended up awarding a pretty significant amount of money, because the plaintiff was relatively poor and sympathetic, and because the company had acted somewhat shady with regard to knowledge about the dangers of asbestos and warning labels. That's despite the tenuous connection between the asbestos they mined and the asbestos that may have been in his lungs (there was no direct evidence of asbestos in his lungs), and the significant probability that the lung cancer was caused by his smoking and not asbestos at all. The scary part is that I felt like most of the jury was at least trying to do the right thing, using the cognitive tools that they had available to them (mainly empathy and reasoning like "they acted shady so they deserve to be fined"). If people didn't even try, it could have been much worse. As it is, though, I pretty much lost my faith in the jury system.

geomark 11y ago

I feel the same way. The three times I served on a jury were all the same. Very few people bothered to read or try to understand the jury instructions. Few considered the evidence that was presented. Most were utterly clueless, totally lacking the ability to perform any logical reasoning. Most just voted their biases. Although, if you have a sharp attorney he could very well get a hung jury for you even if the evidence is slam dunk for a conviction. He just needs to be really good at jury selection.

agiamas 11y ago
these same people are voting for your president or prime minister or MP. If anything, the (unfortunately, long term..) solution is to educate these people, not to abolish jury duty.
- adrianN 11y ago
  You could also abolish voting. /s
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Good luck with that. We'd have to start with totally remaking news media, or even getting rid of them altogether - it's them who present a new outrage every day with a handy judgement to cache and retrieve the next time you see a similar looking situation. But "free speech!", "free media - the cornerstone of democracy!", something something.
  - derefr 11y ago
    Remove economic incentives from news media, perhaps. You'd think news-organizations-as-charities would work, but even being donation-driven still incentivizes populist pandering at the expense of real journalism. We need something that is to current journalism as the Senate is to the House: unable to be blown around by society's ephemeral tastes. The simplest method is probably to pay for journalism through taxes. The BBC is a decent model. Ideally we'd want to retain a multiplicity of viewpoints, though. Maybe a BBC-alike as a grant-funding organization, where small independent journalist groups get grants to go out and investigate, in exchange for an agreement to publish their stories onto the BBC-alike's news wire service (which would then be freely licensed to distributors—basically putting those stories into the public domain.) Rather than the BBC-alike deciding who to hire, let a Journalist's Guild decide who's good enough to publish; anyone allowed into the profession will be trusted to have done something valuable whenever they submit a story, and will be automatically paid out. It's the Guild's responsibility (i.e. that of the other Guild members) to catch their peers submitting nonsense and report them, and have those people's journalistic credentials suspended or disbar them entirely. That'd neatly realign the concept of "journalistic integrity" or "journalistic ethics" to stand at the same strength-of-force on journalists as the equivalent concepts in medicine and law do for their professionals.

MichaelApproved 11y ago

I almost sat on a similar trial with a similar "accidental" outburst from the defendants lawyers. Did this trial happen to be in Los Angeles?

ketralnis 11y ago
San Francisco

visakanv 11y ago

> This type of civil trial only required a 9/12 majority and the other jurors really only saw this as a chance to stick it to the company. "Of course this man should be repaid for the damage done to him!" Any sort of nuance like, "okay sure but should this company be the one to pay it?" was totally lost. He's hurt, so somebody should pay up. That was it. That was their justice. The jury instructions like the actual claims to damages were totally ignored. Most "justice systems" on Earth are really just thinly-veiled vengeance systems, unfortunately.

ckozlowski 11y ago

Civil trials in the U.S.(as opposed to criminal) are an entirely different sort. Google "U.S. Tort Reform" and you'll find treatises on the subject. I agree, it's a total mess.