Samsung Urges Mistrial Citing Racism in Lawyer's Remark
Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) accused Apple Inc.'s lawyer of making a prejudiced remark during closing arguments in a retrial over how much the South Korean company owes the iPhone maker for patent infringement and asked the judge to halt the proceedings.
Context & Ripple Effects
The damages retrial — held because a jury had already found Samsung infringed Apple's iPhone patents and needed to set the sum owed — has been running hot since the start. In 2012 the two camps were already fighting over courtroom theater, from Samsung's bid to limit references to Steve Jobs at trial to a squabble over where each side would sit. Today's move escalates that friction into a direct challenge to the proceeding itself.
Samsung filed an emergency motion asking Judge Lucy Koh to halt proceedings and declare a mistrial, alleging Apple's lawyer injected racism into closing arguments while the jury deliberates. The story travelled fast — Bloomberg's report was picked up the same day by Ars Technica, The Register, Gigaom, Business Insider and others, with FOSS Patents flagging the parallel request to stay the case outright.
First-order effects
- Judge Lucy Koh must decide mid-deliberation whether the alleged remark tainted the jury, putting the entire damages verdict — the dollar figure Samsung owes Apple for infringing iPhone patents — at risk of being thrown out.
- Samsung simultaneously asked for a stay of the case, meaning any award against it would not immediately convert into payment while the motion is litigated.
Second-order effects
- If Koh grants the mistrial, Apple faces yet another round of damages proceedings in a case it has already won twice on liability, extending legal costs for both companies into a fourth calendar year.
- If she denies it, Samsung preserves the remark as an appellate issue — giving the losing party a ready-made grounds-for-reversal argument regardless of which way the jury rules.
Third-order effects
- The episode shows mega-litigation between smartphone rivals hardening into attritional warfare: verdicts become waypoints, and procedural motions — venue fights, evidentiary limits, now bias claims — become strategic weapons that can stretch a single dispute across many years.
- For other handset makers watching, the lesson is that U.S. patent damages trials are contestable long after the jury leaves the room, encouraging defendants to budget for appeals and retrials rather than treating a verdict as final.
The trend: The Apple–Samsung patent war is shifting from juries deciding damages to both sides fighting indefinitely over process itself, making procedural motions a core competitive tactic.