The foreman in the recent patent dispute between Apple and Samsung in a Californian court has hit back at criticism that the jury failed to do its job properly.
The jury in the case found overwhelmingly in favour of Apple, awarding the firm £665m in damages – which the judge in the case could triple – and throwing out Samsung's counter-claims.
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The verdict has been widely criticised, with many commentators feeling that the jury failed to take enough time to arrive at such a controversial decision, and that it perhaps suffered from local bias, given that Apple is based in Cupertino, not far from the courtroom.
Jury foreman Velvin Hogan has hit back against this criticism in an interview with the BBC, in which he cites viewing the meeting minutes between senior exectutives from Samsung and Google as a decisive factor in the jury's decision.
"[The minutes were] for a tablet and Google was concerned that for the sake of their operating system that the look and feel and the methodology that they [Samsung] were using to create their tablet was getting too close to what Apple was doing.
"And in the memo themselves they stated that Google demanded that they back away from that design.
"And later there was a follow-up memo among themselves, these executives, and in black and white it says: we elect to not pass this information down to the divisions that were actually involved in the design.
"So, from the sake of the engineers they went merrily along continuing their design not given any orders to back away.
"They knew nothing of that meeting to me that kind of raised a light bulb in my head that when I got in the jury room I wanted to read the minutes of that meeting myself.
"When we went into deliberation in the jury room we not only had all the physical evidence of everything that was presented, but we also had sealed source code in its entirety from both sides, we actually had the memos that were talked about in the trial... and there was a piece of evidence after a piece of evidence that just clearly stacked up."
Samsung has stated its intent to appeal against the decision, while Apple has already moved to have eight Samsung devices banned in the US.
However, Samsung is poised to disrupt the imminent launch of the iPhone 5 by bringing a new lawsuit around patented 4G technology against Apple.
