[pedrocr]

The question should be that but they were arguing for the jury, which if the last verdict is any indication will tend to have a tenuous grasp of what they are deciding on. On the last trial the jury delivered an inconsistent verdict in record time, which it then had to amend, and then the jurors started giving interviews where they basically admitted they went along with the foreman's opinion because he was a patent holder. Even though he totally misrepresented patent law and argued that the prior art wasn't valid because it was from a different type of hardware.

[w1ntermute]

This is one of my big problems with the jury system. Perhaps there should be a hybrid system where a judge (or other disinterested, yet informed, third party) participates in order to ensure that the facts are not distorted.

[pedrocr]

I think that's actually what happens in the US. The judge will give particularly detailed instructions (the original trial had a 109 page manual) and the verdict is actually a structured response (which is why they were able to give an inconsistent verdict). The system tries to do this properly but then the jurors are swayed by the emotional arguments and there's not much you can do about it. In this case maybe forcing them to deliberate on individual arguments would help. From the interviews they basically backtracked from "we think they're guilty" to "how do I fill out this damn form", negating the value of the structure that was in place.