Jury Deliberation and Social Dynamics

The sides quickly made themselves known once deliberations started. We can call the major groups pro-plaintiff and pro-defendant. The pro-plaintiff side had 6 members and the pro-defendant side had 4 core members. There was also a steady but constantly changing contingent of people who couldn’t make up their minds.

The size of the sides had the deliberations deadlocked early. The instructions stated that we had to have nine jurors in agreement on each question before we could move forward. We were stuck for several days on question 4 (out of 33 questions on the verdict questionnaire). We skipped question 4 to see what other questions we could agree on. We answered many of the other questions, went back to question 4 and answered that one (I changed my vote to get to the necessary 9 votes). We soon deadlocked on other questions.

We got out of deadlocks through talking and negotiations. These did not get loud so much, though there were some jurors who were louder than others. These conversations were often difficult. I will say that the pro-defendant jurors made up there minds early on and had difficulty expressing their rationales when asked to do so; they typically answered that the defendant did nothing wrong and the plaintiff deserved nothing.

There was a tendency among the pro-plaintiff side to be more willing to provide explanations for their choices. Several times members of the pro-plaintiff group offered to change their vote if the pro-defendant side would explain themselves. Those explanations were rare and defaulted to the defendant did nothing wrong and the plaintiff deserved nothing.

I was in an interesting spot. As a union member (I admitted this early in the deliberations) it was seemingly assumed that I sided with the plaintiff. I was not sympathetic to the plaintiff; the plaintiff’s attorneys did not present a compelling case that the plaintiff suffered as a result of the defendant’s actions. However, as I mentioned previously I felt the defendant’s HR team was responsible for doing damage to all involved via their ineptitude.

In the end a nominal amount was awarded to the plaintiff more as punishment to the defendant than reward to the plaintiff. In fact, that is the argument that kept the jury from deadlocking on the award amount; it seems it was easier for the pro-defendant crew to punish the defendant than it was for them to award anything to the plaintiff. Of course, there were lessons to be taken from this experience. I will discuss those in my next post.