Catching Up On The News

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I've been deep in trial preparation, and thus off line, for the last week or so, and I've missed a lot. There are over a thousand stories piled up in my feed reader. Here are some worth stopping over:

• They're frugal in Nashua. Jim Burke and Dave Eisner of New Hampshire Law Blog point to research done by the Nashua Telegraph in December. The Telegraph compared verdicts in Nashua County, New Hampshire with those in three nearby counties. The verdict-crunchers found that, true to their reputation, "Nashua juries tend to be a tad tight-fisted." The difference was most striking in medical malpractice cases: "Plaintiffs have won just three of the 23 malpractice cases (13 percent) tried before juries in Nashua in the last 15 years, and the average award was less than $7,000."
• Decisions as we age. The New York Times wrote yesterday about a study of decisionmaking in the elderly. As you might expect — or might have experienced — it declines. In the study, research subjects were asked to draw cards from four different decks. "Two decks, not to mince words, are for suckers," the Times summarized. "They give short-term rewards but long-term losses. The other two decks do the opposite."

  Elderly subjects kept drawing from the sucker decks, long after younger subjects had tried the other. The work helps explain how con artists prey on the elderly — and how elderly jurors might struggle to reach a verdict.

• A jury questionnaire in Milwaukee. Thanks to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's great law blog Proof and Hearsay for posting the jury questionnaire used by local judge M. Joseph Donald in a child molestation case. Proof and Hearsay doesn't sound like a fan of the process, noting that the questionnare includes "several heavyweight questions about being victimized by/accused of sex crimes that the randomly-picked people had to answer to comply with their civic duties." Better in the questionnaire than in open court, is my view, and this sample will appear in Deliberations' library shortly.
• Taxes on trial, maybe. Actor Wesley Snipes doesn't believe in paying taxes, and the WSJ Law Blog has a nice review of his trial as it goes to the jury.
• Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor. So says a new study via Science Daily. Nothing at all to do with juries, but as a blue-eyed human I thought it was pretty interesting.