Judge Agrees To Re-Examine Jury Foreman Who Awarded Apple $1.05b In Damages

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Jury foreman Velvin Hogan.
Jury foreman Velvin Hogan.

Judge Lucy Koh has agreed to re-examine the role of jury foreman Velvin Hogan, who found Samsung guilty of patent infringement and awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages earlier this year. Samsung requested a retrial back in October after it became apparent that Hogan failed to disclose details of a lawsuit against Seagate that he was involved in 20 years ago.

Samsung is a major investor in Seagate, Hogan’s former employer, which sued him back in 1993 after he had filed for bankruptcy. Samsung believes that because of this litigation, Hogan would have been biased. It didn’t help that Hogan failed to disclose the litigation to Judge Lucy Koh during jury questioning at the Apple versus Samsung case.

Hogan argued at the time that the incident took place in 1993, over 20 years ago, and that he was only asked to disclose cases he had been involved with within the last ten years. He also suggested that Samsung only allowed him to be on the jury so that it had an excuse for a retrial if the case didn’t go in its favor.

It’s still unlikely that Samsung will get its desired outcome, however. GoMo News reports that according to legal experts, “it is generally hard to overturn a jury decision because of alleged misconduct if only because US law doesn’t accommodate intrusion into how jurors reach their decisions.”

Source: Macworld

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