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Amber Heard's desire for the high-profile defamation lawsuit between her and her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, to be declared a mistrial was denied by the court on Wednesday.
A Virginia court refused seven post-trial petitions submitted by Amber Heard in an attempt to overturn the jury judgment in her defamation dispute with ex-husband Johnny Depp.
In their defamation claims, a jury awarded Johnny Depp $15 million in damages and Amber Heard just $2 million after a weeks-long trial in June.
Judge Insists Johnny Depp, Amber Heard Trial Commits No Mistake
Attorneys for Amber Heard requested a new trial, arguing that information on the jury panel list supplied to counsel before to trial did not appear to match the demographics of one of the jurors, jeopardizing Heard's due process rights.
In a court judgment issued on Wednesday, Judge Penney Azcarate stated that Heard's due process rights were not violated since there was no fraud or malfeasance in the jury selection process.
Azcarate said that if Amber Heard's legal team had a problem with the jury selection process, they should have addressed it during the weeks-long trial. Before the judge's verdict, Johnny Depp's attorneys issued a rebuttal document to Heard's post-trial petitions, calling the legal arguments ridiculous, as per CNN.
Amber Heard, 36, had contended in part that Juror 15 in her and Johnny Depp's case was not the person called for jury duty, so jeopardizing her right to a fair trial. According to Heard's attorneys, the jury mix-up may have occurred because there are two people with the same last name who reside in the same house but are of different ages - 77 and 52.
By the counsel, the elder one was summoned, but the younger one eventually responded to the call for jury service and sat for the trial. Depp's attorneys claimed that Heard's team could have rectified the issue before the trial began because both parties got a "pre-panel jury list" more than two months before.
His lawyers then argued that even if the exchange occurred, Heard would not be harmed since the juror was vetted by the court and the party's counsel. The judge agreed with Depp's claims, stating that the jury panel was questioned for a whole day.
It was unclear if Heard intends to appeal the decision. Last month, the 59-year-old 'Pirates of the Caribbean star was awarded $10.35 million in damages in his defamation lawsuit against Heard, his ex-wife, according to the New York Post.
Can Amber Heard Appeal the Decision Again?
Depp filed a $50 million lawsuit in Fairfax County after Heard wrote a 2018 op-ed piece in The Washington Post about domestic violence, referring to herself as a public figure representing domestic abuse. The piece never named Depp by name, but his attorneys argued that many paragraphs in the story impliedly defamed him by referencing widely publicized abuse charges she made as she filed for divorce in 2016.
Heard then filed a $100 million defamation counterclaim. By the time the matter went to trial, her counterclaim had been reduced to a few words made by one of Depp's attorneys, who labeled Heard's accusations of abuse a fake.
On her counterclaim, the jury awarded Depp $15 million and Heard $2 million. Because punitive damages in Virginia are limited to $350,000, the $15 million verdicts were lowered to $10.35 million. In Wednesday's judgment, the judge did not explain why she rejected Heard's other allegations.
Heard argued, among other things, that the $10 million verdicts are unsupported by the facts and appears to show that jurors failed to focus on the fallout from the 2018 op-ed piece - as they were supposed to do - and instead looked broadly at the damage Depp's reputation suffered as a result of the allege.
Heard's attorneys also contended that the judgments for Depp on the one hand and Heard on the other are illogical. Heard's attorneys contended that Virginia law is rigorous regarding jury identities and that a misidentification case is grounds for a mistrial. They produced no proof that the 52-year-old son, named only as Juror #15, attempted to replace his father intentionally or insidiously, but they think that possibility should not be dismissed.
Heard can still file an appeal with the Virginia Court of Appeals. The issues brought before the appeal court may differ from the issues rejected by Azacarate on Wednesday, CBS News reported.
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