Jury duty completed

After being on a Jury now, I understand the often talked about possibility of having professional jurors. Common people just might not be able to handle it.

This was a pretty cut-and-dry case. The law in OK says, that if you do damage to another vehicle while operating your own, then you are liable for those damages. If multiple people cause damage to another vehicle, each person is fully responsibile for the damages.

The defendant in this case didn't think that she should pay for the damage ($17,000 for a small transit bus that she totaled) because of, well, I guess because (a) someone cut her off (b) she couldn't walk for a year and (c) she's been through enough already. But the bus was minding its own business driving south in the southbound lane of a major divided highway when she crossed from the northbound lanes into his lane and plowed into him head on. The defense did nothing to show that she didn't do it, they admitted to that. No one ever found this car that "cut her off" causing her to leave her side of the 4-lane and head into oncomming traffic, so she just thought that we should find him and make him pay. But the LAW says that, even if there was another car involved, they would BOTH be FULLY liable for the damages.

It was a clear case of "if you think that the defendant is liable, check this box. if you think the defendant is not liable, check this box." Our first vote was something like 7 to 5, and we needed 9 to convict her or set her on her way. In the end, the vote was 10 to 2 in favor of the law and the plantiff. The two hold outs were of the opinion that "she didn't deserve it" and "her lawyer was nicer."

Now my wife has been through a week (7 days, actually) of jury duty and ran into an even more clear-cut case. There is a contract that is signed by two parties and says that the first party will pay the second party 16 cents and then some per day per horse, for "any" contracts that the first party gets for keeping these horses. The first party (the defendants in this case) basically decided that he didn't want to pay the second party (the plantiff) because he "didn't feel like it" and "he didn't work enough to deserve it." The contract, by the way, doesn't stipulate what the second part had to do to earn his 16 cents per horse per day, but he still did a lot, including photographing, mapping, and calculating the total volume of water in over 100 ponds, and making two trips, at his own expense, to Nevada. The contract didn't say he had to do any of this, he just did. The defendant admitted to falsifying contracts to show a lessor amount of money. The defendant admitted on the phone that he was cheating the plantiff out of his money (the plantiff secretly recorded the conversation- that's legal in Oklahoma by the way) and managed to get in quite a few swear words. But the swearing cheating defedant is an elder at his church. That was part of his defense. Does this case sound any easier? There really aren't any more facts. When she got into the jury room, only 3 people thought they should find for the plantiff. Why? Because he said "yes m'am" and "thank you" and was polite. They thought he was lying and being rude by saying "yes m'am". And he didn't "do enough work" to earn the $500,000+ that the contract said he was owed. It took 7 hours for my wife and three others to convince 6 other people that he was at least due the money owed on half of the horse deals. These 9 other people wern't even smart enough to realize that they already had 9 votes in their favor and didn't need any further deliberation. Are you kidding me!? 9 people wanted to completely ignore the law and make their own decision based on emotions and facts that had nothing to do with the case!

Both of these cases really should never have gone to court- the law is clearly in favor of one party, but apparently the lawers know that jurors aren't smart enough to follow the law, they'd rather ignore it and follow their emotions.

I was more than happy to serve as a juror, because it's one of my few responsibilities as a US citizen. But maybe the old saying about "12 of your peers who aren't even smart enough to get out of jury duty" is all too true.