Samsung possibly alleging jury misconduct in appeal

[sir pball]

Just saw a couple of things over at Groklaw; rundowns of Sammy's appeal (actually request for a new trial) with some interesting insights:

First

…the redacted first section may be about jury misconduct, based on the cases cited for pages 2 and 3 (13 and 14 of the PDF). For example, here's United States v. Colombo, where a juror was accused of failing to mention something she should have in voir dire. Here's United States v. Gonzalez, about the right to a trial with unbiased jurors. Here's United States v. Perkins, a case where a media account about jury deliberations resulted in the court holding an evidentiary hearing, in which the jurors were questioned under oath by the judge about the reported irregularities. You can find the L.A. Nut House case here, a case where the jury was inconsistent in its decisions. And a case cited on page 13 is L & W, Inc. v. Shertech, Inc., which you can find here, and it too is about a jury coming in with an inconsistent verdict.

(Jury misconduct allegations are usually heavily redacted to protect the alleged miscreants from harassment)

Second

But the one that took my breath away is this one -- a large excerpt of the voir dire, or jury selection process, Exhibit 1 [PDF] attached to the John Pierce Declaration in Support of Samsung's motion. And what we see is the foreman being asked if he is chosen for a jury whether he will set aside all he knew of patent law from his own experience and just follow the court's instructions and judge based solely on evidence admitted at trial. He answers yes. That, of course, is exactly what he did not do, judging from interviews he and another juror gave to the media.

PJ's a smart and generally unbiased analyst (she was 100% pro-Apple in the Apple-Pystar case) with a pretty good track record...as for myself, I'm not rooting for either side particularly; I'm a 25-year Mac user in the Google cloud - the sycophants' reactions are what interest me

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. No kidding...

I like Woz's thoughts on this mess...