Personal Injuries Deserve An Unfiltered Jury, Not Bound By Medical Malpractice Caps

You are entitled to a jury of your peers.  These are people in the community that make up a rough cross-section of the community.  They are not a perfect representation, and sometimes they are not really a representation of the true community at all, but they are still members of your community who were called to decide a matter.

Your right to a jury of your peers does not come with an asterisk.  Your peers are not limited in what they can assess, or the damages they may provide, or any other limitations.  Your peers are to determine what happened and what you can be compensated for.  While in a civil case the rights of a person to a jury are more limited than in a criminal case, where it is sacred, this does not mean that jurors in a civil case get restrictions like caps which restrict what they can get.

Further, these caps should not be given by the federal government.  A major premise and point of our government is that the states are left to determine the safety of their citizens—not the federal government.  Issues like this are generally left up for state rights.  This is for good reason, as each state has unique safety issues and concerns to take into consideration.  Safety is a states issue, not a federal government issue.  The federal government should not be meddling with medical malpractice caps.

Nor should the states, for the above reasons.  These caps have been struck down by other states with them, including Wisconsin most recently which did it in dramatic fashion.  The bottomline is that the federal government should not be doing anything related to the state’s safety issues.  And the states should not be meddling in the important rights people have for a jury of their peers.