The judge should have never let the jury come to the point of a verdict if they thought anything was unsound. Once the verdict is delivered it should be respected - if there was something wrong before the point of jury deliberation, the judge should have stopped the trial.
Right, if there are any mistakes before the jury gets the case, a judge can declare a mistrial.
Quite apart from anything, one can never confirm post-hoc whether jurors have followed instructions or not (how do we know that the jurors comments after the trial weren't due to bribes by Samsung (or Apple for that matter).
Sometimes it's really easy to tell if the jurors followed instructions or not.
In this case the jurors were told to award Apple with the value for patents they thought Samsung infringed. For example, to guide them, Apple said they thought their bounceback patent was worth about $2 per unit. So the jury should've awarded that amount or less (much less, to tell the truth).
Instead, it sure
looks like they decided to "punish Samsung" by going with an amount that was much more than what Apple themselves had said the patents were worth... even though punishing was NOT their job. At all. Stuff like that, where the jury clearly might not have followed the rules, are why Koh is scrutinizing the jury's results.
Make more sense now? In this case, it's not so much about the jury decision... Samsung still infringed... but what they did with that decision.
Having a judge review the verdict of a jury because they think that the jury 'didn't follow instructions' is an amazingly arrogant move. Jury by one's peers was meant to prevent a single person from having too much power, and having judges review jurors' verdicts undermines checks and balances (and the 6th amendment) IMO.
I hear ya, but at the same time, it's protection for the defendant. Remember, a judge cannot change a not-guilty verdict to guilty. The judge can only take an obviously poorly obtained guilty verdict and reduce or remove it.
