“We need to rescue the American jury system,” Winmill said.

    A graduate of Snake River High School and president of the Idaho State University student body in 1974, Winmill went on to graduate from Harvard Law School in 1977. After practicing law in Denver, Colo., for several years, he returned to Southeast Idaho and joined a Pocatello law firm.

    In 1987 Gov. Cecil Andrus appointed Winmill as a district judge in Pocatello’’s Sixth Judicial District where he served until President Bill Clinton appointed him to the federal bench in 1995.

    During his 27 years as a judge, Winmill said he has developed deep respect for the wisdom of juries and the effectiveness of trial by jury which Alexander Hamilton called the “safeguard to liberty.”

    “I would trust a jury’s judgement more than my own,” Winmill said.

    The seasoned judge said studies have proven that juries are efficient, accurate and follow the law. And the number of jury trials has fallen precipitously in the past seven decades. In 1938, 20 percent of civil cases were decided by juries. That percentage dropped to 11.5 percent by 1962 and stood at just 1 percent last year.

    Judge Winmill said five factors are responsible for the drop in the number of jury trials in America.

    They are: a change in public attitudes; statutory limitations; hostility toward trials by the U.S. Supreme Court; the high cost of litigation; and the “myth of the runaway jury.”

    Winmill said it is up to attorneys to do something about the spiraling cost of legal battles and that may help change public attitudes about the legal system, but he lashed out at skeptics who have no faith in juries.

    “We, the American people have been sold a bill of goods in this regard,” Winmill said about the idea that juries cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

    As an example, Winmill walked through the famous McDonald’s coffee case where a jury in New Mexico awarded a woman millions of dollars in 1994 after she spilled hot coffee on her lap.

    Winmill said organized forces in favor of tort reform spread the myth that it was simply a case of a woman cashing in on an incident where she was clumsy. In fact, the 79-year-old plaintiff in the case was scalded by coffee heated to 180 degrees after McDonald’s had received hundreds of complaints about the danger of the overly heated liquid. And the woman’s burns were serious, requiring surgery and a lengthy recovery.

    Winmill said the facts are the jury awarded the woman $160,000 in actual damages for medical bills and lost wages and $2.7 million in punitive damages for neglect. The punitive damages were reduced to $500,000 — the amount of profit McDonald’s made on coffee sales over a two-day period back in 1994.

    Winmill said the true facts of the case were buried in the urban myth that followed the verdict.

    “I have yet to see a verdict that was the result of a runaway jury,” Winmill said.

    The judge said history has proven the wisdom of 12 members of a community sitting in judgement of legal cases. As an example, he shared the story of Sir Francis Galton, a 19th Century British statistician who doubted the collective wisdom of a group of people.

    To prove his theory, Galton observed a contest at a fat stock sale where the crowd was asked to guess the weight of an oxen for prize money. The animal’s actual weight was 1,198 pounds and the average guess of the crowd was 1,197 pounds — much closer than the single closest winning guess.

    Galton thought that was a fluke, but after repeating the test over and over, the results were the same: The collective guess was always closest.

    “There is something incredible about the wisdom of the crowd,” Winmill said.

    He said juries will come to the right conclusions if there is a diversity of opinion, independence for individual actions, a decentralized process and adequate instructions about the rules.

    “It’s time to reclaim that part of our heritage,” Winmill said about jury trials.