Samsung Says Jury Foreman's History Marred Apple Verdict
Velvin Hogan was sued by former employee Seagate, as well as a personal bankruptcy filing.
Samsung has requested the trial verdict which saw Apple being awarded $1 billion in damages be dismissed due to jury foreman Velvin Hogan's personal history.
Hogan failed to disclose to chief Judge Lucy Koh of a lawsuit from his former employer Seagate Technology as well as a personal bankruptcy filing from 1993. Based on the revelation, the Korean firm asked the trial be thrown out.
“Mr. Hogan’s failure to disclose the Seagate suit raises issues of bias that Samsung should have been allowed to explore,” Samsung stated. They also referred to Hogan's statements that were made to media outlets after the verdict; Samsung argues that it represents a sign that he didn't answer the court’s questions “truthfully” in order to “secure a seat on the jury.”
Samsung said its link with Seagate has been a "substantial strategic partnership," as well as referring to the fact that the lawyer who filed the complaint against Hogan nearly two decades ago is reportedly married to an attorney who works for Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, which is the law firm representing Samsung in their court battle against Apple.
Hogan, however, denied any misconduct to Bloomberg. He stressed that, due to the court's rule of potential jurors required to disclose prior involvement in litigation over the past decade, he didn't have to reveal his lawsuit with Seagate as it occurred more than 10 years ago.
“Had I been asked an open-ended question with no time constraint, of course I would’ve disclosed that,” Hogan added . “I’m willing to go in front of the judge to tell her that I had no intention of being on this jury, let alone withholding anything that would’ve allowed me to be excused.”
The jury elected Hogan particularly due to his experience as an electrical engineer. "I answered every question the judge asked me” and Samsung “had every opportunity to question me," Hogan stated.
Hogan expressed how he was surprised to find out that Samsung was not aware of the history found in Tuesday's filing. He questions if the company “let [him] in the jury just to have an excuse for a new trial if it didn’t go in their favor.”
If the $1 billion case does ultimately get dismissed, it'd certainly be a further blow to Apple's legal woes. Not only are they facing lawsuits such as the one pertaining to its Passbook app introduced in iOS 6, but they also recently lost their injunction against Samsung's Galaxy Tablet 10.1, with the device's U.S. sales ban subsequently lifted.
My favorite quote from him was this:
I didn't think advancements in processor architecture was the issue being debated. Also, nice of the guy with the bias to explain things to the rest of the jury by interpreting the source code for them. IF they needed that explained an impartial expert should have been requested with their testimony on the record for transparency. I'm pretty sure he wasn't qualified or called as an expert witness, although, at this point, it appears he could have been a full fledged member of the Apple legal team.
I disagree. I think the verdict was correct based on current patent laws.
Now whether the patent laws actually make sense is a totally different conversation.
Would you want to hand over $1 Billion dollars to Apple, let alone $1 hundred....
My favorite quote from him was this:
I didn't think advancements in processor architecture was the issue being debated. Also, nice of the guy with the bias to explain things to the rest of the jury by interpreting the source code for them. IF they needed that explained an impartial expert should have been requested with their testimony on the record for transparency. I'm pretty sure he wasn't qualified or called as an expert witness, although, at this point, it appears he could have been a full fledged member of the Apple legal team.
The fact is that Apple is not the source for the inspiration that made the iPhone a success. Not as they would have you believe anyhow.
-CB
This is a legit concern to address, but I'd be shocked if this results in a verdict dismissal.
Except nothing you said is something Samsung is using to try to get the verdict overturned. While I was hoping Samsung would win, the 2 reasons they have proposed are extremely weak.
A personal bankruptcy nearly 20 years old? Sorry, but that is hardly relevant in this day and age. As for the Seagate lawsuit, if all the court asked was about lawsuits over the past decade, than once again, he didn't answer falsely. Samsung had the chance to question every juror. If they are allowed to explore bankruptcies more than a decade back, why didn't Samsung's attorneys ask if he had ever had any bankruptcy at any time.
Of course there is the matter of lawyer who brought the lawsuit against Hogan for Seagate nearly 2 decades ago being married to an attorney in the firm representing Samsung, however, how realistic is it for Hogan to have known this? Did this attorney work on the case? How many people do research on every person peripheral to their existance? And why didn't either Samsung or the law firm know this during jury selection? Obviously both Samsung and the law firm have greater resources to do research and if they didn't know about the marriage between the 2 lawyers, it's hardly reasonable to expect Hogan to have known.
Now I'm not saying Hogan was right in the things he told his fellow jurors or that they were right to have listened to him, however, if this was grounds for having the verdict thrown out, you would think Samsung would be bringing these things up, not the 2 very weak points that they have.
maybe a bit of a reach unless the juror overheard or knew they were an item/married or saw their spouse in, around the courtroom or outside of the judicial building.
We cant help where these companies were originally founded. Not everything revolves around America. Now if they had originally been located in the US, THEN shipped off overseas, and kept selling stuff here I'm sure your argument would make some sense. But they didn't, and it doesn't.
In other words, we had a juror who decided to substitute his own flawed understanding of the law and and even more grossly screwed up knowledge of technology with his own agenda.
I'm all for the protection of inventions, but come on. You can't say "I think the verdict was correct based on current patent laws" without actually having read the important portions of the briefs, motions, and statutes.
Yes, he brought some stupid arguments into the jury room. Problem is, Samsung isn't trying to get the verdict overturned because of them so I don't know why it keeps being brought up. If they were grounds to get the verdict overturned, than why did Samsung use 2 very weak points, the bankruptcy and the fact that the attorney who brought suit against him for Seagate is married to a lawyer in the firm representing Samsung.
The problem is, the bankruptcy happened in 1993. If Hogan is right and he was only asked if he had a bankruptcy in the past 10 years, and in my personal experience with filling out forms, that is consistent to be asked only back to a certain date, then he did not lie.
The bigger question is why did Samsung's attorneys not ask him technical questions during jury selection that likely would have brought these biases out before trial and they could have had him dismissed from the jury pool.
But as Groklaw notes, the transcript of Hogan’s voir dire makes no mention of that limited time frame.
“The next question is, have you or a family member or someone very close to you ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a witness?”
Sounds pretty open-ended to me.
So this leaves us with 2 likely options. 1 - he didn't answer the question honestly to increase his chances of getting on the jury for some reason. 2 - they mis-transcribed the question and left out that important piece of information. I'll let you decide which you think is more likely. Why hide it if you have nothing to hide?
Every internet source is quoting Bloomberg, but Bloomberg does not have a link to the court document that was submitted, nor is the document available online.
This may be completely true and may be everything in the document, but without being able to support the claims with any kind of proof beyond "because we said so," this is just another rumor.
Given the facts about his lying during jury selection, we can see now that he wanted to get into this jury and also misled the other jurors who thought he was more knowledgeable about patent laws than they were and not that he was biased.