Inside The Jury Room —

Apple v. Samsung juror: we “wanted to send a message”

The foreman, an engineer and patent-holder, felt Samsung was a copyist.

After delivering a speedy $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung on Friday, the nine Apple v. Samsung jurors were escorted out a rear exit by court staff, leaving the throng of waiting reporters with no information on how the verdict was reached.

Now we know at least part of the answer. The nine-person panel believed that Samsung had taken a "calculated risk," and they believed that Samsung "knew or should have known what they were doing was infringing," jury foreman Velvin Hogan said in an interview today with his hometown newspaper, the San Jose Mercury-News.

Some of the most influential evidence in the jury's eyes included internal Samsung e-mails like the one from a designer describing the difference between the iPhone's user interface and a Samsung phone as the "difference between Heaven and Earth," as well as competitive intelligence documents where Samsung analyzed differences between its own phones and the iPhone. Also swinging the vote Apple's way was the fact that Google warned Samsung that some of its products looked too similar to Apple products.

Despite the fact that the verdict came just two and a half days after closing arguments, Hogan insisted the jurors were thorough and methodical in their deliberations. "We didn't whiz through this," he said. "We took it very seriously."

Hogan, a 67-year-old electrical engineer who lives in San Jose, said he was influenced in part by his own experience acquiring a patent. By the end of the first day of deliberations, he said he decided that Samsung's prior art arguments didn't hold up.

"I was thinking about the patents, and thought, 'If this were my patent, could I defend it?'" Hogan recalled. "Once I answered that question as yes, it changed how I looked at things."

The jury "wanted to send a message to the industry at large that patent infringing is not the right thing to do, not just Samsung," Hogan told the newspaper. "We felt like we were 100 percent fair, but we wanted something more than a slap on the wrist."

Another juror, Manuel Ilagan, confirmed to CNET that Hogan's influence on the jury was significant. "He had experience," said Ilagan. "He owned patents himself... so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier."

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