Jury Duty - Part 1

Much to my surprise, I served on a jury for 5 weeks.  I was surprised because I am an attorney, and attorneys hardly ever serve on a jury, at least in the past, though apparently the times are a changing (a Bob Dylan line).  [It's interesting that though lawyers serve the courts in many capacities, our legal system usually seeks non-lawyers to weigh the evidence at trial.]

The most difficult part of serving on a jury is that you cannot discuss the case with anyone until all the evidence is submitted, and then you cannot discuss it with anyone outside the jury deliberation room until the jury has reached a verdict.  In the meantime, you are hearing all this stuff, and cannot even discuss it with other jurors, at least until all the evidence has been submitted.  And even then you cannot discuss it with anyone outside the jury deliberation room, even with other jurors, since the idea is to only discuss it in the presence of all the other jurors.

Anyway, we finally reached a verdict, so I am now free to discuss the case, which many asked me about during my service, but which I had to say I could not discuss until the jury reached a final verdict.

Basically, this case involved a driver hitting a 15 year old teen crossing a marked crosswalk at between 35 and 40 miles an hour.  The driver claimed he did not see the pedestrian because it was dark, he was driving in a line of about 4 cars or so, and the teen was wearing dark clothing.  He claimed he only saw a blur at the last second.  There was no skid mark on the roadway.  The driver hit the pedestrian on the far driver side of the vehicle where his left headlight was at.  The teen's body crumpled, his head hit the windshield, and then he was apparently thrown 70 feet where his head again slammed into the pavement.

The boy received a concussion, and had no memory of the accident.  His girlfriend, who was then 14 years old, testified she looked before they entered the crosswalk, saw the headlights in the distance, and thought the driver had sufficient time to brake or slow down, and so they proceeded into the crosswalk.

Plaintiff brought in experts who testified that the accident occurred 23 minutes after sunset, during twilight, and that there was still sufficient light from the sky to see the pedestrians.  In addition, the headlights from the car would have provided enough light for the driver to have seen the pedestrians, especially since they walked almost all the way across the front of his vehicle.  The accident reconstruction expert attributed the accident to driver inattentiveness.  He also said it would have been impossible for Leo to have reached the extreme driver side of the vehicle if he had jumped out in the middle of a line of cars.

One witness said it was pitch black, but the jury did not believe her.  It was unclear whether the street light above the crosswalk was on or not.  However, the jury found that the driver had been negligent, since we believed there was sufficient light for the driver to see the pedestrians.  One or two jurors disagreed, but in a civil trial, 9 jurors are needed to reach a verdict, and at least 9 agreed on this.

A tougher decision was whether the teen himself was also negligent.  Though the Vehicle Code says drivers must yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk, it also says that requirement does not relieve pedestrians from their duty to exercise due care for their safety.  The jury took a whole day to deliberate on this question alone.

The police determined that the accident was due to Leo (the 15 year old teen) not meeting this requirement, not exercising due care for his safety, though they did not write him a ticket.  When they interviewed the 14 year old girl (Alexandra) at the hospital (she received a broken nose, a blow to her head from when it hit the pavement, and minor cuts and bruises), she said they had not looked before they entered the crosswalk.  When asked at trial why her later testimony differed, she explained she was in shock and pain in the hospital that night, and she couldn't recall the events that clearly.  It was only later when she visited the site that her full memory of what happened came back to her.  The jury believed this.

In the end, the jury found that Leo was not negligent.  On this point, I along with 2 other jurors disagreed and voted that he was also negligent.  However, the 9 votes carried the day on this point.  Because of this, we never got to the question of how much percentage of negligence to assign to the driver and how much to the pedestrian (comparative negligence).

Then we turned to the question of whether the driver's employer was liable for the driver's negligence.

 The driver, Almir, worked as a chef-instructor for the Culinary Institute of America (CIA).  Almir had finished work for the day at their St. Helena campus, and was driving to his home in Sebastopol.  Usually, an employer is not liable for their employee's negligence when they are commuting to and from work.  However, the law provides an exception to this rule when the employer uses the employee's vehicle for business uses.  The jury instruction on this had a lot of language about whether the employer required the employee to use his or her vehicle for business, or whether it derived a benefit from the use of the vehicle came to rely on it's use, and whether there was an agreement about this.  The language had a very broad scope to it, so that both the requirement, or the agreement, could be express or implied.  There was a lot of evidence that Almir frequently travelled for the CIA, often using his vehicle, that the CIA benefitted from his travels, reimbursed him for his milage expenses, and at times paid him for his travel time.  The jury did not want to find the CIA liable, but after carefully studying the language of the jury instructions, and reviewing the evidence, the jury came to the tough decision that the employer was liable.  Again, 1 or 2 jurors disagreed, but there were at least 9 jurors to reach this verdict, in which I agreed.

This was a 2 phase trial.  Phase 1 only dealt with liability issues.  All issues about damages was reserved for phase 2 of the trial.  In this part, I only discussed the issues we faced in phase 1.  In my next part, I will discuss the damages issues we faced in phase 2.