Jammie Thomas Decides To Appeal Constitutionality Of $1.92 Million Damages Award

from the and-away-we-go... dept

As we speculated earlier this week, given the silence from the Jammie Thomas camp since the $1.92 million verdict against her, we assumed she was gearing up for an appeal -- and that's now been confirmed. Thomas' lawyer has announced that Thomas has decided to appeal, questioning the constitutionality of the statutory damages awarded, which was the obvious attack point. It will be interesting to see who gets involved in actually managing the appeal.

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Lawyers Use Juror's Twitter Messages As Basis For Appeal

from the reaching dept

Lawyers for an Arkansas building materials firm have appealed a $12.6 million judgment against the company, alleging that a juror's Twitter messages show that he was biased against the company. The lawyers say tweets like "I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else's money" and "oh and nobody buy Stoam. Its bad mojo and they'll probably cease to Exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter" illustrate that the juror was predisposed towards a verdict that would "impress his audience". Meanwhile, in a corruption case in Philadelphia, a defandant's attorneys allege a juror's tweets and status updates broke rules about disclosing deliberations, and say they could warrant a mistrial. Lawyers, along with everybody else, are paying more and more attention to social-media updates, so it's likely we've not heard the last of the silly Twitter-based legal maneuver. But it's not just the information-spreading that's got lawyers and judges worried, it's also juries looking up info on their phones during trials. In a recent federal drug trial in Florida, a judge declared a mistrial after learning that 8 jurors had accessed online information on their mobile phones during a trial. A cornerstone of the US' adversarial legal system is that juries can only consider the evidence that's presented to them, and jurors looking info up on their own breaks the longstanding rules of evidence of the system. It's not as if the legal system is under threat from technology, but certainly expect to see plenty more stories along these lines in the near future.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Comcast Appeals FCC's Wrist Slap

from the you-can't-even-not-punish-us! dept

As was widely expected, Comcast has appealed the FCC's ruling concerning its traffic shaping practices -- even though that ruling was a total slap on the wrist that had no real punishment other than a verbal scolding. But, of course, for Comcast, it's a question of principle -- with the principle being that the FCC has no authority over it on this matter (except, of course, when it's politically convenient for Comcast to say otherwise).

While the ruling against Comcast was rather pointless and meaningless, this appeal could create a much more interesting lawsuit, helping to more clearly define the FCC's authority on these issues. Amusingly, despite the effective issues being identical to the question of the FCC's authority over consumer electronics in the broadcast flag debate from four years ago, expect various public interest groups to align on the opposite sides of where they did back during that fight. Apparently, FCC regulation is bad, except when it's in agreement with your opinion.

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