Are jurors allowed to teach law to one another?

Question

I vaguely recall in the case of Oracle v. Google in regards to Java v. Android that was happening in a district court physically located in San Jose, California, that one of the jurors was familiar with the process and procedure of acquiring patents, and there was some controversy in regards to this fact (he was sharing his experience with the rest of the jurors).

Is a juror having a prior knowledge of law, other than what has been presented to them in the specific court case, allowed to teach others about any such understandings they have held prior to the start of the proceedings? Is it cause for them to be disqualified, or even for the whole panel to be disqualified?

Answer 1

I finally found the actual transcript of the voir dire part of the case mentioned in the question.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2012090614295190

As can be evidenced from the transcript, the judge has specifically instructed the two jurors working as engineers at the local tech companies that they'd have to "forget" what they know about both the software engineering and the patent law itself, too, starting their work on the whole case with a completely clean sheet, using a very simple criteria for making decisions:

One side or the other is going to have the burden of proof on -- one side has the burden of proof on some issues, the other side has the burden of proof on other issues. When you go into the jury room to deliberate after you've tried your hardest to understand the evidence, if they haven't educated you on it or if they haven't persuaded you, the party with the burden of proof loses. It's that simple. You don't have to -- you have to make a good faith effort to understand it, but if the party with the burden of proof has failed to do that, the party with the burden of proof loses. That's the standard. You have to -- you, the jury, decide.

Now, what you cannot do is bring to bear something that you've learned in some other case, some other patent case, about how some piece of equipment works or something like that. You can't do that. It has to be based on the record here.

Then, after a short break and a consultation with the lawyers, where Oracle seems to have expressed some concern to having the computer experts be on the panel, which subsequently prompted the judge to declare the following to the two potential jurors who worked at Cisco and HP:

So this is really going to be directed at both of you, but, you know, you come to the party, so to speak, with some prior training that bears upon the subject matter we're going to be hearing a lot about here. That's okay. That's not disqualifying, but you -- it's okay to use your common sense when you render a verdict, but you cannot add to the record in court something that you know about the way software programming works that the witnesses didn't actually testify to. You see what I'm saying?

You've got to decide the record -- the case based on the record made here as opposed to adding into it what else you may have known about the way programming and software works.

Since both jurors had so much software and patent experience that they couldn't disregard it easily, they were thus both excused (page 95 of 224).

All right. I think it would be too hard for you to sit in this case and sort out what you knew already against what is proven or not proven here, and itwould not be fair to the parties to have that extra burden even though you two actually know something about the subject. It's in a way too bad, but it's for the best. So you two are excused to go back to the jury assembly room. Thank you.

The other instructions that the judge gives to the potential jurors is also worth reading (starts on page 36 of 224)

The full transcript is at http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-942.pdf.

In summary -- jurors are only allowed to talk to one another when the deliberation process starts, and, no, they are not allowed to bring any "baggage" to the case at stake.

Answer 2

A more appropriate example than what was presented @cnst would be considering lawyers on the jury panel.

That happens every so often, and typically to the greatest concern to district attorneys in criminal cases. However, this is generally no cause to strike a jury, and if the party used their no-cause strikes, that jury will remain on the penal.

As you can imagine, attorney jurors, during the juries deliberations among themselves, often engage in explaning applicable law to the best of their knowledge which is not on the record or be disclosed outside their deliberations.

The answer may be not, but in practical terms, when a lawyer explains their point in layman terms through generalized principles and formulations, it will be hard to do much about it.

Answer 3

Of course.

Jury deliberations are supposed to be secret. Jurors can teach anything and everything they personally know that could be helpful towards making an intelligent and just verdict.

Jurors are free to employ:

• Common sense
• Conscience
• Compassion
• Personal knowledge, experience and understanding
• etc.

to come up with a verdict. That's what a jury is and why juries exist: To allow defendants to avail themselves of such things as common sense, conscience, experience, and consensus in making a determination of guilt.

Experience and intelligence cannot be disallowed in the making of a verdict. Jury instructions that violate any of the above are unconstitutional, null and void, and place the one issuing such instructions in a state of liability for crimes against the people.

Neither judges nor anyone else has any right to rule any personal knowledge or expertise "out of bounds" on the part of a juror. Notice that there is no need in the above case to enter any of the jury's expertise or other information brought by a juror into the court records, so the excuse that the use of experience is disallowed on account of court records is actually a red herring on the judge's part.