Arizona Accident Lawyer Blog

Campaign donations are a powerful thing. According to the House of Representatives, a jury cannot be trusted to decide how much money is reasonable compensation to somebody injured by the negligence of a doctor. According to the same people, a jury is fully capable to decide whether a man is guilty, and whether he should be put to death for his crime. A jury is capable of life and death decisions, but not capable to decide decisions relating to money. How can this be? I guess it just depends on who is giving you donations.

A criminal jury and civil jury come from the same people, who live in the same county. They are chosen randomly, so the same people that sit on a criminal trial could have just as easily sat that same day on a medical negligence trial.

For instance, here is an example of two trials that may occur in Maricopa county, during the same week, with the same jurors making the decision:

Trial 1: A doctor is accused of leaving a medical instrument in a baby, which causes severe permanent damage. The baby will suffer for a lifetime from the carelessness. They jury has to decide how much money the insurance company will pay in fair compensation.

Trial 2: A man is accused of shooting a stranger in cold-blood to steal $20. The stranger died. The jury has to decide whether that man is guilty, and whether he should be put to death for his crime.

The same people who became jurors in the first trial could just as easily have been on the second trial. In one case, money rests on a jury’s decision. In the other case, a man’s life rests on a jury’s decision.

Continue reading " WE TRUST YOU TO DECIDE LIFE AND DEATH, WE JUST DO NOT TRUST YOUR OPINION ON MONEY " »

We constantly hear about "the burden of proof" in the criminal cases that are in the media. We have all heard the phrase "beyond a reasonable doubt" so many times that most of us have a strong sense of the fact that for something to be found true in court the jury needs to be certain. No doubts about their verdict at all. We all know this, but it is not true. The “burden of proof” changes from one case to the next.

Now, it is true (or it is supposed to be) that to find against somebody who has been alleged to have committed a crime you have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. But what about in Phoenix personal injury cases where the decision is being made as to whether somebody else caused an injury and how much money they should have to pay as a result of the injury they caused? Do those cases have to be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt?" Absolutely, not.

Even calling it a burden of proof can be a little bit misleading because it is really, as defined in Arizona's jury instructions, a "burden of persuasion." Basically, oversimplified a little bit, it is a 51% v. 49% standard. For instance, if the Suns win a basketball game 122 to 121, they still won. They may not have won it the equivalent of "beyond a reasonable doubt" if we were going to continue the analogy, but they still won. Another way to look at it is if someone had 100 pounds of sand on one side of the scale and another 100 pounds of sand on the other side of the scale, there would have been an equal amount in every way. But one more grain of sand, one more drop of evidence on one side or the other, and the "burden of persuasion" for a civil case has been met.

Continue reading " THE BURDEN OF WHAT? " »