An empty jury box.
A couple years ago, Blawgletter reported a Disturbing Trend in the number of jury trials that Lone Star State civil district courts conducted during 2006 versus a decade earlier. We said:
Skeptical of growing complaints about the vanishing jury trial, Blawgletter did a little research. It found that, in 1996, according to the "Jury Activity" report by the Texas Office of Court Administration (available here), Texas district courts tried 2,971 civil cases to verdict and directed verdicts in 253. Ten years later, the same courts put 1,335 civil cases to juries while instructing verdicts in 459 cases.
What accounts for the 55 percent drop in jury trials and the 81 percent increase in taking cases out of jurors' hands? Has the [Texas Supreme] Court's recent record of overturning verdicts, restricting expert evidence, curtailing class actions, and taking other steps that make cases harder to win for plaintiffs produced filing of fewer cases, more (and cheaper) settlements, and greater boldness by trial judges to kick cases out of court? Blawgletter shudders to think that the subject deserves study.
Study the subject did indeed deserve. Today we update you.
To see what jury trials have done over the last decade, we looked at the year ending August 31, 1998 and compared it to the year that terminated the same late-summer day in 2008. [We chose the dates to avoid the effects of statistics-reporting anomaly in pre-2003 reports.] What did we find? More discouraging news:
- In the 1997-98 time frame, parties paid jury fees in 31,059 cases; 2,517 went to verdict; and trial judges directed verdicts in 286.
- During the 2007-08 period, the jury-fee payers dropped to 22,386 (a 27.9 percent decrease); 1,472 produced a verdict (down 41.5 percent); and directed verdicts rose to 365 (an uptick of 27.6 percent).
We decline this time to speculate on why jury trials continued their downward spiral, directed verdicts proliferated, or – especially distressing — so many fewer parties bothered even to pay the fee to get a trial by jury.
