The Texas jury that penalized Merck $253 million for a death
attributed to Vioxx was sending a message. I got the message but most business people fail to get it.
The message is clear: judges are lazy and corporate lawyers are even lazier.
Most juries are biased against commerce. Civil juries that can sit for months are even more likely to be biased against commerce and corporations. Why? Simple, the only people who can give up a major part of their life to sit on a jury are people who have no serious work responsibilities and are probably outside the commercial sector.
The solution is clear. Juries, all juries, should work only four days, should start at 7am and
finish by 1pm. That way a genuine jury
of peers becomes available … managers and self-employed could serve.
Lawyers who don’t force lazy judges to work hours that are convenient for a decent jury are themselves lazy. A lawyer should demand a change of venues until the lawyer finds a judge who will work decent jury hours.
There is another lesson here too, but much less
important. Businesses spent money and
years getting “junk science” out of the courtroom. That was a waste. Science doesn’t now and never did allow general
scientific observation to be directly applied to individual cases. The general can only be applied to the
particular as a probability. A
scientific expert can only say: ‘there is an 80% probability that this beloved
person died because of something that the dastardly giant corporation did
wrong.’ And a scientific counter-expert
can only be found who would say the probability is ‘less than 50%.’ That leaves 100% up to the emotional judgement of the jury.
We need real juries made up of a real cross-section of our people.