Jurors Expect High-Tech Perfection in This Age of Technology Marvels

A person’s entire criminal history available at the touch of a button.  Surveillance video footage recorded around the clock – and kept for perpetuity.  Medical records from multiple facilities in multiple states consolidated into one easy-to-review chart accessible by any caregiver who treats that patient.

These are the kinds of unrealistic expectations jurors have in this era of James Bond, smartphones and Mission Impossible, and trying to normalize whatever technology is available at your facility can further antagonize jurors who insist the failure to implement whatever key system they think you should have is negligence in itself. 

During focus groups for a recent case, jurors faulted a company because its background check on a potential employee – who later committed a crime at the workplace – failed to uncover previous arrests that jurors believed were a “red flag.”  Nearly all jurors agreed an adequate background check “should have” discovered this information, despite the fact many arrests don’t lead to convictions and aren’t reported to the databases used for background checks. 

Similarly, jurors in a medical malpractice case faulted a hospital for not knowing about a patient’s previous medical condition (even though the patient and his family failed to disclose it to caregivers).  These jurors erroneously believed caregivers could have used some mythical centralized database to access all of the patient’s medical records throughout his entire lifetime.

In both of these cases, jurors’ unrealistic expectations of information technology led them to believe defendants could and should have known things they had no way of knowing. 

In other cases, these high expectations can help the defense.  In one recent case, jurors faulted a parent for not bringing her child to the hospital soon enough when she started displaying symptoms they believed the mother should have recognized as dangerous – if she had “just Googled it.”  In an era when there is so much information at our fingertips, jurors often expect plaintiffs to take the step of looking something up on the Internet or even emailing their doctor to ask a question. 

Whether you’re representing a plaintiff or defendant, we believe it is important to address with the jury the capabilities and limitations of information technology.  You may even need to rely on experts to educate jurors about how systems work and what they are and are not capable of.  Whatever you do, you can’t assume jurors’ expectations are grounded in reality – not when movies and television are establishing the technology baseline, and those expectations are being reinforced by how much information actually is available at their fingertips.

If you’d like our perspective on how to manage juror expectations in your case, we’d be happy to help.  Contact Senior Vice President Claire Luna at 714-754-1010 or cluna@juryimpact.net.

We want to hear from you

All of our observations about jurors and trials come while working side by side with our clients.  Now, we’d like to open this space up to you.  Have a question you’d like our take on?  Fire away, and we’ll print the question (anonymously if you wish) and our answer in an issue of this newsletter.  Have you run across an interesting issue or made an observation you think your colleagues might like to hear about?  Send it along and we’ll share it with our readers.  Don’t be shy – we want to hear from you!  Email us at cluna@juryimpact.net.