Consumer Law

Petit Jurors in Connecticut Honor the Jury System

By Joe Consumer

Did you ever notice that among those who want to wipe out the civil jury system for medical malpractice and other personal injury cases, claiming that jurors are too unsophisticated, arbitrary or emotional to decide these cases, they never suggest that jurors can't handle intellectual property disputes, or criminal cases involving complicated securities fraud, or even deciding whether someone should live or die. In fact, juries can handle all of these cases, they do it every day, and they do it extremely well.

This point was made pretty clear in a moving Today Show segment this morning with several members of the Connecticut jury that yesterday sentenced to death Steven Hayes.  He is one of two men convicted in the brutal home invasion and murder of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley and Michaela. 

One juror talked about the great care they took in making this decision, and  ?how 12 people just came together and worked out the problems of taking another person?s life and that at the same time realize that our founding fathers gave us this tool to be used with great care and we deliberated with great care.?

The jury system is an astonishng, amazing system, isn't it?  Jurors are randomly chosen to sit in judgment of others, deliberate carefully, render competent and just verdicts and then fade anonymously back into the community.   They really are the conscience of the community, standing as watchdogs over wrongdoing, no matter its form.

Unfortunately, however, corporations and their insurers have been relentlessly attacking civil juries in recent years with one goal in mind - to limit their liability exposure by taking judgments away from juries.  In many cases they want to replace the civil jury system with a statutory structure over which their political money can have more control.

Unlike other, weaker democracies, which have abolished the civil jury, our system, thus far, has largely withstood the assaults.  The jury's roots are deeper here.  The American colonists fought the Revolutionary War in significant part over England's repeated attempts to restrict jury trials. The U.S. Constitution was nearly defeated over its failure to guarantee the right to civil jury trial. (The Seventh Amendment eventually resolved the problem.) The right to jury trial has been secured not only by the U.S. Constitution, but by every state as well.

Lets hope it stays that way.

Full post as published by ThePopTort on November 09, 2010 (boomark / email).