Apple vs Samsung: Jurors Discussed their Verdict [Updated]

One of th juror – Manuel Ilagan in the Apple vs Samsung case is now discussing how their came by the verdict.

In an exclusive interview with Cnet, Manuel Ilagan reported that the nine-person jury  knew after the first day that they believed Samsung had wronged Apple. He went out to say that, the jury had several heated debates and nothing in the deliberation process was rushed and that the jury carefully weighed the evidence.

This would be good news for Apple if this is the case. This shows Samsung would have some difficulty overturning the jury’s decision. The jury came to their decision after 22 hours of deliberation, which appeared to be a short time given the complexity of the case. It has been speculated that the jury did not give due diligence to the deliberation process. According to the report Ilagan said, “We found for Apple because of the evidence they presented. It was clear there was infringement.”

When asked what were some of the more compelling evidence, Ilagan replied:

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Well, there were several. The e-mails that went back and forth from Samsung execs about the Apple features that they should incorporate into their devices was pretty damning to me. And also on the last day they showed the pictures of the phones that Samsung made before the iPhone came out and ones that they made after iPhone came out. Some of the Samsung executives they presented on video from Korea, I thought they were dodging the questions. They didn’t answer one of them. They didn’t help their cause.

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When question on why the ruling was largely in Apple’s favour, Ilagan replied:

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It wasn’t clear that the jurors were largely in agreement until after the first day of deliberations.

It didn’t dawn on us that we agreed that Samsung had infringed on the first day. We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents but we were debating about the prior art about the same technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted. Velvin Hogan was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself. In the beginning the debate was heated but it was still civil. Hogan holds patents so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent, what was prior art, because we had hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn’t something out there before Apple.

In fact we skipped that one, so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down.

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Reuters is also reporting on an interview they had with Velvin Hogan. According to the report, Hogan had this to say about the case:

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• We didn’t want to give carte blanche to a company, by any name, to infringe someone else’s intellectual property. However, Apple’s damages demand of up to $2.75 billion were extraordinarily high, partly because it was unclear whether Apple had enough component supply to sell more phones even if it wanted to.

• We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist. We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable.

• All of us feel we were fair, that we can stand by our verdict and that we have a clear conscience in that we were totally not biased one way or another.

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Source: Cnet, Reuters

Image Credit: Codenametech