Non-English speakers may face bias in the courtroom
Small study of personal injury cases shows a tilt.
Tresa Baldas / Staff reporter
September 22, 2008
Plaintiffs' attorneys have always had a hunch that litigants who don't speak English face bias in the courtroom.
Now they have more than a hunch.
A study released this month by the Texas Tech University Rawls College of Business and a plaintiffs' lawyer shows that non-English-speaking plaintiffs in personal injury suits fared worse than their English-speaking counterparts. The study was based on 223 civil jury verdicts during the past decade, and looked at awards that were significantly lower than final settlement offers. It found that Hispanic plaintiffs who relied on interpreters during testimony were 15% less likely than English speakers to obtain jury verdicts exceeding the last settlement offer.
"My firm has represented a lot of Spanish speakers over the years, and it's always been a little hunch of ours that, 'Man, you get an interpreter involved, and this thing is going south on us,' " said plaintiffs' attorney Angel Reyes of Dallas' Heygood, Orr, Reyes, Pearson & Bartolomei, who worked on the study.
"If you can't testify in English, you're better off taking the last pretrial offer than taking it to a jury," said Reyes. He added: "Lady justice is supposed to be blind, but she isn't deaf."
The year-long study was part of a working paper authored by two business professors and Reyes. It was not funded by any one individual, law firm or the school.
"It started out as an academic question more than anything else," said Bradley T. Ewing, one of the business school professors who co-authored the paper. "The question really was: Is justice blind in terms of hearing? It doesn't seem so from our results."
Chris Seeger of Seeger Weiss, a New York-based plaintiffs' firm, said he, too, is aware of a language bias in the courtroom. The trick, Seeger said, is to make sure the language barrier isn't held against the plaintiff. Lawyers have to vet out any potential prejudices during voir dire. And they have to make sure jurors see the plaintiff as a hardworking, decent citizen.
Civil defense attorneys, meanwhile, dispute claims that jurors show bias toward non-English-speaking plaintiffs. Whopping jury verdicts involving plaintiffs of all backgrounds suggest otherwise, they claim, adding that juries tend to sympathize with victims, no matter what language they speak.
"I think the assertion is unfounded, based on my observations of 30-plus years; I just don't see it," said Neal Goldberg, past president of the DRI-The Voice of the Defense Bar, a group of more than 22,000 defense lawyers.
Goldberg of New York's Goldberg Segalla, who has defended corporations in a wide variety of claims, said that he believes jurors don't care if someone has an accent or can't speak the language. They just want to understand the case.
"If someone is speaking in a manner that they find it difficult to understand, they're going to be less receptive — I would think intuitively — to that testimony because they're not understanding it. Or it's taking too long to hear it."
That's not being biased, he said, it's being confused.
©2008 Angel Reyes