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ok so here's the story of when i actually was chosen to serve on a jury
i guess i'm supposed to say buckle up but while there are some cool details let's get a hold of ourselves
so, kings county civil court. it's a personal injury case. car accident. liability has been stipulated, this trial is just for damages. the plaintiffs are a latino couple in their 60s. defending the case is the company that financed the purchase of the car that hit them.
that they are only latino is only relevant because they were both native spanish speakers, so all of their testimony went through a translator. i expected this to be unremarkable.
(the questions did not have to go through a translator; they both spoke english. a lot of people prefer to testify in their native language, which is entirely reasonable.)
the plaintiffs' attorney is handsome, slick, looks like he stepped out of a TV. the defendant's attorney is more of a nebbish and his suit looked like it cost what the other guy's socks did.
there is no judge for this. the attorneys handle it on their own unless there's a dispute. after laying out the rough contours - who the parties are, general category of case - they ask if anyone has any reason they can't serve. people give reasons of various validity.
i ask for a moment with them outside. tell them i'm a lawyer, tell them that the firm i work for does a fair amount of work for a different affiliate of the parent car company of the defendant. maybe it will get me out; i don't have any other reasons.
they didn't care. defense attorney says "oh, if you're a lawyer, how am i doing in there?" i reply "counselor, you know you should never ask a question you don't know the answer to." plaintiff's lawyer cracks up (a little ingratiatingly); defense counsel not so much. i'm picked.
the claims are for injuries allegedly sustained getting rear-ended in a fender bender. whiplash, shoulder pain, hand injuries. while i said liability was stipulated, i mean defense counsel admits his client hit their car. the damages trial is because they dispute the injuries.
in addition to the personal injury claims, both claim "loss of consortium" which is fancy lawyer talk for "we can't have sex anymore"
so they testify to their various injuries and then the plaintiff's lawyer has to ask about the loss of consortium claim. so they are asked about their sex lives before the injuries. he is 60ish, has a very masculine demeanor.
he testifies that before the accident they were having sex multiple times a day in multiple positions but no longer.
his wife on the other hand is petite and softspoken and dressed like she's teaching at the little house on the prairie. she too testifies that she was having sex multiple times a day, in multiple positions. the translator was stone-faced and professional the whole time.
defense attorney tries to introduce medical records but plaintiffs object, claiming lack of authentication because the rehab clinics where they were allegedly treated are no longer open. which makes me wonder where the records came from. probably the plaintiff, but oh well!
battle of the experts. the plaintiff's expert more or less did something close to "that thing that looks like a fingerprint? that's trauma." because there really wasn't anything on any of the films that revealed anything that looked like an injury, which the defense expert said.
this was not exactly linear, because the defense attorney did cross-examine the witnesses. he elicited that the husband had been injured multiple times at work, some similar to the injuries from the crash. then he walked him through the loss of consortium claim.
he had him confirm his testimony that prior to the crash he was regularly having wild sex, in the three years prior to bringing suit. he confirmed, yes, multiple times a day in multiple positions.
and then the defense attorney asked if he'd ever sued anyone else. and he admitted that he had, and he showed him the complaint and he admitted that it was his complaint and he pointed him to the paragraph where he claimed loss of consortium for the exact same time period and
the plaintiffs' attorney jumped up and objected and said that the complaint wasn't verified, so those were the lawyers' words not the clients' and the judge sustained the objection and did not require an answer or allow further questions on the other lawsuit
the defense rested on the cross-examination and only put on their own expert, who, as i said earlier, was more convincing.
the judge gave us our instructions and we were taken to the jury room at around 4pm. just one day of trial if i remember correctly. they find out that i'm an attorney so even though i'm not the foreman they basically tell me to take over and walk them through this.
but i'm a pretty junior attorney. my experience of juries is mostly "watching 12 Angry Men" so I say "ok why don't we all write our preliminary verdicts down anonymously so we can be honest without worrying about other people's opinions"
and a nurse from Bensonhurst replies to my suggestion "they're full of shit and should get nothing."
but we do the anonymous thing anyway and it comes back 4-2 (i think) in favor of a defense verdict and so i say ok let's talk about the evidence. i'm one of the 4 and agree with the nurse from Bensonhurst.
so here's where it gets tricky. the plaintiffs *have* medical records from rehab, but we never saw them because *the plaintiffs* objected to their own medical records coming in. the prior loss of consortium claim which we all know about is also *not* part of the record.
what is part of the record is a 60 year old couple claiming that they fuck like teenagers on cocaine, overlapping injury history and competing experts but only one of them seemed credible. other than the general truism that soft tissue injuries are tricky, there's not much there.
after discussing all of this for a while, we're definitely at 5-1 except for one juror who "doesn't think they should get nothing" because after all they were in a car accident and a few of us were like "the money doesn't come out of the sky, the other side actually has to pay."
which i didn't feel good about saying, because i don't actually care if the car financing company has to pay for anything but this seemed like a bullshit case. the damage to the car was not very significant as i recall it.
we talked through everything - and i can't say truthfully that the jury ignored the excluded evidence - but the sex claims were just so incredible that nobody believed plaintiffs at all. we revote, 6-0 for the defendant. and call for the bailiff.
We go back to court, announce the verdict and we were done before 5. The plaintiffs attorney catches some of us in the rotunda and asks why he lost and we explained the credibility issues and he waved us off, exasperated.
multiple times a day, multiple positions. come on man.
~fin~
~fin~
a few people have asked why i was chosen even though i was an attorney, and New York doesn't exempt attorneys. Jury service is a right, an honor and often sucks. So they don't automatically bar anyone or let them off the hook. Having lawyers on/off the jury is a tactical decision
