We're Not Last, But We're Trying Harder!
The US Chamber of Commerce rates Alabama's legal climate right close to the bottom.

"Participants were asked to give each state a letter grade in each of the following categories: overall treatment of tort and contract litigation, treatment of class-action suits, punitive damages, timeliness of summary judgment/dismissal, discovery, scientific and technical evidence, judge impartiality, judge competence, jury predictability and jury fairness. Alabama was the only state to be ranked as one of the five worst in each of the 10 categories. Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and West Virginia were common on the bottom tier of state liability systems. "

Make of this what you will, but having served on a civil jury in a case of wrongful termination against a large employer, one of the things that made the biggest impression on me was the absolute lack of juror sensibility. What appeared on the surface to be a roomful of normal, reasonably intelligent, everyday people revealed that nine were sharing only one very small, damaged brain.

In the end, the other three of us were able to hang the jury, resulting in a mistrial. In a sane universe, and by all rules of jurisprudence, the plaintiff should have been fined or jailed for filing a frivolous lawsuit. But, unfortunately, the idea that Big Corporations Are Always Wrong runs pretty deep. In one particularly testy exchange with a fellow juror, I reminded him that the law required the plaintiff to prove her case, with some kind of testimony that she had been dismissed for filing a workman's comp claim (the only type of dismissal under Alabama law which is actionable for wrongful termination). This evidence was never presented, and I reminded the fellow that it had not. "Well, NO ONE could PROVE that kind of thing!" he blustered. He never saw the irony in that one. The rest of the jurors decided it didn't matter whether Big Company was guilty or not, and decided to try to come up with some amount to compensate the plaintiff. Again, the three of us with three individual brains reminded the rest that it was stupid to discuss compensation for something that had not been proven, and for which the defendant had not been found guilty. They glowered at us and went back to trying to manufacture theories under which the Big Company could be held to task.

In all, it was a very frustrating, made all the more so by people whose sense of fairness and reason was swept aside by incredible willful ignorance. The problem did not appear to be one of formal education, but a complete lack of rational thought. The only thing I could compare it to is the "Burn the Witch!" scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Which is appropriate, I suppose.
posted by Terry at 4:32:00 PM