Is it possible for a Jury to see the harm in the Law? Certainly.
But
it's also possible for a Jury to decide a 6 year old shoplifter should get the
death penalty.
Checks and balances Must exist - even upon the normally
sacrosanct decisions of a Jury. When you end up with an entity (of which a Jury
can be considered) with ultimate power and no checks and balances you end up
with a situation where extreme harm and extreme injustice can occur.
The
Jury in the Apple vs Samsung case decided to:
1) Ignore the Jury
Instructions
This is clear from the very first Jury Instruction that the
Jury was only supposed to consider evidence as available in the trial - not
externally brought to the trial.
2) Write their own Laws
This is clear
from the Jury deciding to award sufficient damages to be a deterrent. The Law
was outlined in the Jury Instructions and the Jury was clearly only supposed to
find for actual proven damages.
In my humble opinion - if one is going to
decide the given Law is wrong, then one must decide in favor of the benefit of
the greater Society. This is an extreme choice one is making and as a result
one should be erring on the extreme side of caution.
There is no valid
reason to ignore a non-extreme Law such as:
Only actual proven damages can
be awarded.
While the writers of 12 Angry Men may have authored a situation
where it "looks good on paper" that a Jury went their own route in finding
Justice - the reality of having that applied in real life tends to be very
different. And it is very different for the simple fact that no human is
perfect and every human is prone to commit errors.
Just my humble
opinions on both the Law and Human Character.
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