I've known that the system was bad for years. It's been eight or nine years since I was on a jury in a civil suit: An injured policeman suing Circuit City. Their big delivery truck had hit his stopped small pickup truck at, I'd guess, 5 to 10 miles per hour. He had a back injury, although he didn't seek treatment for it until driving to Lake Tahoe the next day.
The thing is, the plaintiff in a civil suit is required to show that there is a BETTER than 50 percent likelihood that the defendant is responsible. In this case, it needed to be shown that the accident had probably caused the policeman's back injury. However, doctors could NOT say that. And the cop had a preexisting condition: He had TWICE received workman's comp and taken six weeks off work for his back... once ten years earlier when he'd removed a suicide from a vehicle, and five or six years later when he'd moved a fallen tree from the street.
This last injury had retired him. At the ripe old age of . . . approximately 35.
How, then, can a jury conclude that an injury visible on an MRI in the wrong part of the plaintiff's back (lower versus upper lumbar, and his symptoms didn't match those you'd expect from where the MRI showed the defect), with no evidence that the defect was recent or even an injury (comparable abnormalities are often seen in healthy peoples' spines), was, with a greater than 50 percent certainty, caused by a minor car accident? (Neither vehicle was very badly damaged, so I call it minor.)
Yet the jury wanted to give him MILLIONS!
I remember one juror saying that his own back had been injured in an accident, and he hadn't received NEARLY enough for it.
Another had a son who was a policeman. She didn't report during that in the pre-trial screening as I think she should have (the lawyers had SPECIFICALLY asked other jurors whether they had such relationships or had strong feelings about policemen. And, at the end of jury selection, they asked the whole group whether any of us had anything we wanted to volunteer about ourselves). I overheard her talking about her son late in the trial and wasn't smart enough, or gutsy enough, or sure enough of what I'd actually heard, to contact the judge. That bugs me to this day.
At the end, when the jury awarded him about $300,000, I felt sick. (Only 9 of the 12 have to agree with the decision. I was unable to stop it from going as it did, but I at least had an impact on the dollar amount since it was derived from a series of votes that kept throwing out the highest and lowest awards. It was sort of an average.)
I remember how one of the other jurors was so thrilled. She said it made her feel like Santa Claus.
What sort of a sick person feels like Santa Claus when she gives away another person's money? Oh, yes. That would be a liberal.
The jury system definitely needs work.
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