Ever since the verdict from that case between two of the biggest companies in tech – Samsung and apple – was passed it was obvious hat Samsung weren’t going to let it rest. Why should they? Everybody makes an appeal and often these don’t effect the verdict but, Samsung are hoping that they have a strong case thanks to what they’re calling “jury misconduct”. Velvin Hogan – the man that led the jury as jury foreman was quite busy after the end of the trial, talking to Bloomberg and the tech media in general. Quite often, Hogan did nothing but arm Samsung’s lawyer with a case of appeal.
Samsung are now offering up “jury midconduct” in a bid to secure a new Apple trial, to right the wrong that they felt they suffered at the juror’s decisions. Samsung’s team of Lawyers will be appealing to Judge Koh on grounds that the jury did not follow her instructions on how to deliberate on an outcome. It’s clear to me that Samsung are right as well after all, the instructions given to the jury were to “decide the case solely on the evidence before you.” Basically telling the jury to come to a verdict solely on what you have been presented with in court and what you have learned of patents and the patents in question from this trial. Velvin Hogan however, had other ideas, in an interview last month with Bloomberg he described how he blatantly went against these instructions saying that “Some were not sure of how prior art could either render a patent acceptable or whether it could invalidate it. What we did is we started talking about one… (I) laid it out for them.” What Hogan was doing there is injecting further evidence not presented to the jury in the court – thus going against the instructions laid out to them and effectively changing what would have been the jury’s verdict with new evidence. The jury was there to pass judgment on evidence presented to them by Samsung’s lawyers and by Apple’s lawyers not on evidence from Velvin Hogan.
Samsung won’t have an easy time overturning a verdict because of Jury Misconduct let alone bringing a new trial to court however, it’s going to be interesting to see just how they fare. Especially with Judge Koh’s increasingly terse nature towards both parties. It’s not often that the US Law System grants things like this in fact there are general rules against this sort of thing. However, I hope that Samsung do get a new trial because, let’s face it it’s not as if Velvin Hogan carried out Judge Koh’s instruction to the letter and so any verdict out of it should be counted as unfair.