Legal News

Eight (Extremely) Angry Men (And Women)

By Ashby Jones

Wow. We’ve heard of judges having to call a “time out” when lawyers let their tempers get the best of them. But jurors? This is the stuff they make award-winning movies about.

It’s all playing out in the first product-liability trial concerning Merck’s osteoporosis drug Fosamax. (Check out our earlier blog post on the case here.) According to this story, by Dow Jones Newswires’s Chad Bray, tensions are running high — very high — among jurors deliberating over whether Merck should be found liable for alleged bodily damage caused by Fosamax.

The judge on the case, Manhattan federal judge John Keenan, called for a daylong “cooling off period” after the deliberations reached a boiling point on Wednesday. Keenan suspended deliberations until Friday morning and offered to have court security officers escort individual jurors to the subway after two separate notes were sent out of the jury room Wednesday afternoon about the tenor of the deliberations.

Neither note was read publicly in court.

“It’s not unusual during jury deliberations that people disagree each other. There seems to be some disagreement here,” the judge told jurors. “I’m going to give you a cooling-off period.”

The jurors, five women and three men, have been deliberating since last week over whether Fosamax caused a severe jaw injury suffered by Shirley Boles, a 71- year-old Florida woman.

Outside the presence of the jury, the judge said that he would declare a mistrial in the case if a verdict isn’t reached by 5:30 p.m. EDT Friday.

On Wednesday, Timothy O’Brien, who is representing Boles, asked for a mistrial, saying one juror had indicated in a note that she was being intimidated and had been threatened. The judge denied the mistrial motion. “Frankly, it’s the most brutal deliberation or audible deliberation I, as counsel, have have been privy to,” O’Brien said.

He noted that shouting could be heard coming from the jury room several times during deliberations.

Paul F. Strain, a lawyer for Merck, opposed the mistrial motion, saying a second note, signed by seven other jurors, didn’t seem to support the other juror’s claims of intimidation.

Strain said the juror, in her note, indicated she had been the subject of threats of physical violence and had a chair thrown at her. He called her claims unsubstantiated.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 10, 2009 (boomark / email).