Mary Rosenblum: One Good Juror

Illustration by Anthony Bari.

At first, it looked as if she had lost before she’d even started. The defense attorney finished his argument, took his seat at the opposing counsel’s table, looking relaxed and confident. For a moment, the courtroom was silent; Erin heard only the blood coursing in her own ears as she completed the download of her client’s e-files.

“Ms. Mendel?” the judge said. Erin rose slowly. She had commenced scanning the data, which made it a struggle to vocalize.

“Your Honor, a moment please. I’m still coming up to speed on the case.” She addressed a simulacrum seated behind a raised bench at the end of the courtroom. The judge’s image, of an elderly, bespectacled woman, was larger than life-size in order to increase her presence and authority in the courtroom. But factors like apparent sex and age were largely irrelevant for assessing the temperament of an artificial judicial intelligence. Much more important would be a knowledge of the early cases on which this judge had learned and evolved its decision-making ability. Erin didn’t have time to look up that information.

“The court permitted your last-minute substitution as counsel for the plaintiff,” the judge was saying, in a severe, schoolmarmish voice and diction, “but not at the cost of delaying these proceedings. Now, please respond to Mr. Clark’s points and advise the court of any reasons why your client’s claims should not be dismissed as a matter of law.”

Erin had barely heard defense counsel’s argument. All she had known when she’d walked into the courtroom ten minutes earlier was that she represented the plaintiff in a products liability case. A high-profile one, judging from all the media reps and curious citizens she had to squeeze past in the doorway and who now filled the spectator seats.

She cleared her throat. The judge wouldn’t wait any longer. She had to say something, right now, or she would be hit with time or monetary sanctions.

“Your Honor,” she began—the client, what was his name again? “Mr. Polk has suffered brain damage as a result of using the product manufactured and distributed by the defendant.” She hoped she was getting this much right. Yes—there it was in the medical records. “Permanent, steadily increasing erosion of long-term memory, loss of personality, as a direct and proximate result of—”

The judge interrupted. “Yes, Ms. Mendel. As I understand it, causation isn’t disputed. Is that correct, Mr. Clark?”

Good—if she’d pegged Clark right, he loved the sound of his own voice too much to stop at a simple yes or no. She might pick up another minute or two.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Clark gathered himself to his feet. “We don’t deny that use of our product can cause such injuries, but only in a statistically insignificant number of cases. This risk is outweighed by benefits to several million other users for whom the product is perfectly safe.”

“Then the only question is whether the product is defective. You should proceed to address that point, Ms. Mendel.”

What was the product? She accessed her predecessor’s discovery files. Design drawings, pages of technical specifications flickered through her mind. Come on, the common name is good enough for now…

My God. It was the cerebral implant made by NeuroTek, Inc.

The same implant she wore inside her own head, was using right now.

Erin had tried enough cases to let none of her shock come to the surface of her face; she recovered quickly, even as she became aware of the latest medical studies showing that Polk was far from alone.

“This injury has been reported in 987 other users of the NeuroTek implant,” she told the judge. “How could it not be defect—”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Clark said, rising to his feet. “Evidence of other product injuries is prejudicial, and not admissible in cases where causation is undisputed.”

“Correct,” the judge said. Erin realized why NeuroTek had not disputed that the implant had caused the brain damage. She would have to find a different approach.

“A moment, Your Honor, to confer with my client?” The judge might be impatient with the delay, but would not refuse her this.

The judge removed her spectacles and glared. “Please make it quick, Counselor.”

She leaned over to the man seated at the table beside her. Ephraim Polk had a slight, wiry build, good, disciplined posture, and a face that could not be called handsome but was striking nonetheless. She had seen his unsmiling photo somewhere before, she was sure, in a news clip or magazine perhaps, but it had given little hint of the impact he made in person, seated at close range.

“How long did you wear the implant?” she whispered. Erin turned an ear toward him and closed her eyes, as if listening. She did want to know the answer, but right now it was far less important than the few seconds she gained to scan the evidence offered to the court by the client’s former lawyer.

Polk’s features wrinkled in thought. “I’m… not sure.”

“Keep thinking about it, and say something back to me whether you recall or not.”

During this exchange, Erin accessed the depositions of both sides’ expert witnesses, including the neurobiologists. She was annoyed to find herself glancing sideways at Polk as she did.

What was the law here? She had never handled a products liability suit, on either the plaintiff’s or defense side; she had warned him of that. Still, he had begged her to represent him.

“I just can’t remember, for sure.” Polk’s head was bowed in thought. “Must have been around the time I started working professionally in news art. Whenever that was.”

She was nodding her head, but her attention had turned away from scanning her implant’s internal buffer to connecting to the Net’s law library.

“Ms. Mendel, the court is losing patience.” The judge removed her spectacles, shook them for emphasis at the side of her head; as she did so, the whole side of her face there twisted up, eyebrow rising, mouth half-grimacing into a smile, even an ear wiggling out, as if these features were connected by invisible strings to the spectacles. The effect was ludicrous, and Erin had to stifle a smile. Must be a glitch in the personality-to-image interface; or else the interface was simply attempting to manifest some quirk in the judge’s core personality.

Erin straightened, not yet having received a response to her legal search.

“Your Honor, I call the court’s attention to a factual dispute in the expert testimony. The defense expert does claim the product is reasonably safe for its intended use. But the plaintiff’s expert, Dr. Singh, opines that the NeuroTek implant is unreasonably dangerous, and that incorporation of a different wetware interface probably would have avoided the—Mr. Polk’s injury.”

“Yes, but what about the cost issue? As Mr. Clark has pointed out, the Product Liability Reform Act, as amended in 2034, was intended to free consumers of the unreasonable costs of safety measures that benefit only a minority of individuals. The NeuroTek product has received federal approval, and its safety warnings are adequate as a matter of law. The court has reviewed the recordings of Dr. Singh’s testimony—he nowhere suggests that NeuroTek could have used a different wetware interface without increasing the product’s cost, does he?”

The results of Erin’s own legal search had come back, and she confirmed that the law was indeed as unfavorable as the judge described. There had to be something more in Singh’s testimony…