This and that: Knee replacements, privacy fails, and jurors advising judges

Originally published by Douglas Keene .

From time to time, we bring you tidbits that we don’t want to devote a whole blog post to but still find interesting. Today we’ll cover medical implants that are not FDA approved, the belief that social media has killed privacy, and a novel experiment in which jurors help judges make sentencing decisions.

You might want to make sure that medical device is FDA approved…

This one is hard to believe but a non-FDA approved medical device was sold (and ostensibly used) about 18,000 times before the government shut it down. The device was the OtisKnee which was used in surgeries for knee replacement. It is essentially like a specialized carpentry device which allowed the surgeon to line up a bone saw precisely and (allegedly) speed both surgery and recovery. The corporation making OtisKnee had not sought FDA approval and when they did, they were rejected due to failing to prove the product safe and effective. Read more about this situation at Pacific Standard magazine and remain aware of how easy it is, in the $110 billion a year medical device industry, for tools to be used quite widely without FDA approval.

Privacy is dead in the age of social-networking

Most of us likely won’t find this hard to believe but it is still eye-opening. In September and October of 2014, 6,063 adults were surveyed about privacy in the age of social media. What is unusual, is that the sample included people from all around the world— and in every country— the majority believe privacy is dead.

There was no real difference between the scores in developed versus developing countries. We all seem to know (at least intellectually) there is no longer any real privacy. The article itself lists a couple of apps to use to enhance your privacy. One allows you to create “self-destructing social media posts” and another lets you “securely share” an image with specific Facebook friends only—all other friends “see a picture of a kitten” instead. These probably won’t work to keep your social media presence entirely invisible but they appear to help keep what you don’t want public hidden (for now).

Judges asking for sentencing recommendations from jurors who heard the case

One of the questions sometimes posed to jurors is whether the conduct of the litigants reflects how they want business to be conducted in their community. It takes the question from a purely legal one to one that has a relationship to their day-to-day lives, their values, and their belief about business and society. In other words, it taps into their community sense of justice. And here’s a story of a judge asking jurors for their sense of community justice. This was a case involving an unrepentant man convicted of “possessing, receiving, and distributing child pornography” with more than 1500 sexually explicit images of children on his computer (some less than 12 years old). The prosecutor wanted 20 years (the statutory maximum). The judge polled the jurors and the average of their sentence recommendation was only 14 months. The judge then sentenced the defendant to “the statutory minimum of five years in prison”. The article itself has multiple perspectives on whether the judge should have done this polling and then apparently made a decision for sentencing informed by juror sensibilities. It is well worth reading.

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Related posts:

1. Judges are biased in favor of psychopaths whose “brains made them do it”


2. Was Sonia Sotomayor right about female judges?


3. What do those jurors really know about science and technology?

Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.

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