A list of good stuff posted in other places about juries last week:
Jury news and events of the week are memorably collected every Friday in the National Center for State Courts's Jur-E Bulletin. This week's issue is here, and you can subscribe by E-mail here.- Evan Schaeffer's excellent Illinois Trial Practice Weblog picks up, and interprets for trial lawyers, a recent study showing that people answer questions, even objective factual questions, differently if the same question is phrased differently.
- Trial Ad Notes neatly pulls the gist of a subscription-only National Law Journal article identifying different types of anti-corporate bias among potential jurors.
- Of the many on-line discussions of the Philip Morris case, the one at Womble Carlyle's South Carolina Appellate Law blog is one of the more relevant to trial lawyers.
- South Carolina Appellate Law blog also notes the South Carolina Supreme Court's recent affirmance of a trial court's decision to excuse a juror who, asked whether he could apply the death penalty, "took a very big deep [breath] and exhaled as if he were very uncertain as to whether or not he could do that," even though he said he could.
- Of several candidates, Best Jury Story Of The Week award surely goes to the case where the juror became ill. That's not so unusual, you say; true. But this was a medical malpractice lawsuit brought by football coach Charlie Weis, and when the juror collapsed, the two defendant doctors rushed to his aid. Afterward two jurors said they could no longer be objective toward the newly heroic defendants, and a mistrial was declared.
