Samsung claims jury foreman misconduct tainted Apple trial

Apple’s billion-dollar trial victory in August was tainted by the jury foreman’s failure to disclose a lawsuit and his personal bankruptcy, Samsung Electronics Co. said in a request to a judge for the verdict to be thrown out.

Samsung said foreman Velvin Hogan was asked during jury selection whether he’d been involved in lawsuits and didn’t tell the judge that he had filed for bankruptcy in 1993 and had been sued by his former employer, Seagate Technology Inc.

Samsung has a “substantial strategic relationship” with Seagate and the lawyer who filed the complaint against Hogan is married to an attorney who works for the firm that represented Samsung in the trial against Apple, the Suwon, South Korea-based company said in a filing Tuesday in federal court in San Jose, California.

“Mr. Hogan’s failure to disclose the Seagate suit raises issues of bias that Samsung should have been allowed to explore,” Samsung said in its request for a new trial. The company also said Hogan’s public statements after the verdict suggest he failed to answer the court’s questions “truthfully” to “secure a seat on the jury.”

The Aug. 24 verdict is part of a global fight for dominance in the $219 billion global smartphone market. The world’s two biggest makers of high-end phones have accused each other of copying designs and technology for mobile devices and are waging patent battles on four continents.

Hogan, in a phone interview on Tuesday, denied that there was any misconduct, saying the court instructions for potential jurors required disclosure of any litigation they were involved in within the last 10 years ― and that the 1993 bankruptcy and related litigation involving Seagate fell well outside that time range.

“Had I been asked an open-ended question with no time constraint, of course I would’ve disclosed that,” Hogan said, referring to the bankruptcy and related litigation. “I’m willing to go in front of the judge to tell her that I had no intention of being on this jury, let alone withholding anything that would’ve allowed me to be excused.”

Hogan said once he was selected as a juror he “took it as an honor” because the suit was related to his job as an electrical engineer, which he’s done for almost 40 years.

“I answered every question the judge asked me” and Samsung “had every opportunity to question me,” Hogan said. He added that he’s surprised Samsung didn’t know about the history it’s now citing given the relationship the lawyer Samsung refers to in its filing has with another lawyer at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, the firm representing the company.

Hogan said Tuesday’s filing has him wondering whether Samsung “let me in the jury just to have an excuse for a new trial if it didn’t go in their favor.”

Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, California- based Apple, declined to comment on Samsung’s filing.

Adam Yates, a spokesman in the U.S. for Samsung, didn’t immediately return an e-mail, sent after regular business hours, seeking a response to Hogan’s comments.

The nine-member panel reached a unanimous verdict in three days of deliberations following the trial. The jury awarded Apple $1.05 billion after finding that Samsung infringed six of seven patents at issue. Apple is using the verdict to seek a permanent U.S. sales ban on eight Samsung smartphones and a tablet computer.

Hogan, who told the court he had served on three juries in civil cases, spent seven years working with lawyers to obtain his own patent covering “video compression software,” a hobby of his. He worked in the computer hard-drive industry for 35 years at companies including Memorex Corp., Colorado-based Storage Technology Corp. and Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corp.

Based in part on that experience, jurors elected him foreman, Hogan said in an interview in August. The only dissenting vote was his own, he said. 

(Bloomberg)