What started out as a case concerning a pharmaceutical giant and antitrust law has morphed into a case over whether gay jurors can be removed from a jury based on their sexuality as it heads to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, according to the Associated Press.
There is already a constitutional ban against excluding a person from a jury based on race or gender; the court will have to determine whether or not the ban should cover sexual orientation.
In the case SmithKlineBeecham is suing Abbott Laboratories for violating antitrust laws when it increased the price of Norvir by 400 percent. SmithKlineBeecham claims that Abbott raised the price of the essential AIDS medication to harm the upcoming release of an AIDS treatment incorporating Norvir by SmithKlineBeecham, according to the Associated Press.
Many in the gay community were angered by the sudden increase of price and SmithKlineBeecham claims that Abbott removed "Juror B" because of his sexual orientation, according to the Associated Press.
"The ability to serve on a jury is a vital aspect of U.S. citizenship," Erwin Chemerinksy, a constitutional-law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, told the Wall Street Journal. "Just as it's wrong to strike a juror on the basis of race and gender, so too is it wrong for a court to discriminate on ground of sexual orientation."
Abbott has argued that the reasons Juror B was dismissed by one of their preemptory challenges had nothing to do with the juror's sexuality. Juror B was the only juror questioned who had heard about SmithKlineBeecham's upcoming AIDS medication and he was also the only juror who had lost a friend to AIDS, according to the Associated Press.
Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a law professor at the University of Dayton, told the Wall Street Journal that gays haven't suffered the same institutionalized discrimination as women and minorities have when it comes to jury selection.
"The legal books said 'we will discriminate,'" Hoffmeister said. "It's a different ballgame."
