Jury duty

I finally finished jury duty yesterday so I can finally talk about it.

The plaintiff was a genius lawyer with a degenerative muscular condition. Few who have it live to see puberty. This one is one of the very few who reach 51. When he was 42, back in 2000, he was leaving the law firm where he had recently made partner when his wheelchair spun around three times and tossed him out. He went to the hospital where he was moved to the ICU because of his delicate medical condition.

His legs were broken in five places, but he hadn't hit his head. In fact, he'd borrowed a phone and called 911 himself. They set the bones and put him in a splint. Four days later his personal orthopedist put on the cast. His O₂ levels dropped during the procedure, then again a couple hours later. They intubated him so he could breathe. They weened him off, but he'd gotten pneumonia and early in the morning 12 days after he was admitted he had another O₂ level drop and went back on the ventilator.

In 2002 the wheelchair company was sued. Normally the wheelchair company would then be able to turn around and sue the hospital. Instead they settled out of court so that the plaintiff got $14 million and the right to sue the hospital for the rest.

That's where we came in. We saw the case against the three organizations representing the nurses, the residents, and the doctors. We had to figure out if any of those three groups were negligent nine years ago and if that negligence caused the further degradation of the plaintiff's condition. Then, and this is rare, we had to figure out if the initial settlement was justified. And if not then was it too much or too little?

So for nineteen days we sat in a courtroom while it was argued whether his degradation was natural progression or a result of the accident. Then whether it was the fault of the hospital or like when a healthy but elderly person breaks a hip and never recovers. There were experts and witnesses and lots of bench time that the cone of silence prevented us from hearing. We heard arguments from life care planners and economists about how much the plaintiff's lost wages and new injuries would cost over his life span. There was a question about how long that would be, but survivors of his condition to this age are so rare that there are no real numbers.

The biggest issue was the plaintiff's brain. He was a genius lawyer. But there's some suspected brain damage due to the low oxygen levels. Mountain climbers function with lower levels, but they're in better shape. Now he's above average, but has diminished capability. Mostly trouble determining new patterns, but some concentration and memory issues. But is that brain damage, depression, medication, pain, the condition, sleep apnea, or what?

We learned that a Pulse Oximeter [link], a devise for reading pulse rate and blood oxygen levels off a finger, can be thrown by fingernail polish, sweat, getting knocked loose (obviously), the body pulling it's blood supply to keep the head and torso running, or just having the blood oxygen level drop below 75%.

We learned that in rare cases where the spine is all fucked up because the muscles won't hold it up, like the plaintiff, that you can intubate the patient by coming up through the neck instead of down the nose or mouth. You can see it practiced on a dummy at this site. But both anesthesiologists involved in doing that said they'd never done it before or since then.

And we got probably the best jury we could hope for. Sure, there was the person whose breath smelled of mothballs. And the guy who spent much of the trial muttering. At one point we started to think he had Tourette's Syndrome. One guy was very surly at the end and didn't want to discuss anything. One person filled four notebooks with notes. We all chipped in to help her shred her notes at the end. We all contributed to a community snack pool. We shared with the court clerk who would come in to joke and laugh with us. She said we were the oddest jury she'd ever seen. But this was also the longest trial that any of the lawyers, the clerks, or even the judge had ever seen.

One of those lawyer, I swear, looked like Serious Cat. [link]

Some people go their whole lives where they almost never get called for jury duty, and when they do they don't get picked. They want to see what it's like and get a good trial. There's another side to that issue. You might get picked and be held for weeks.

Tomorrow: my courtroom doodles.