But as far as I know, nobody has really considered the effect our malpractice system has on the people who inevitably have to decide each case: jurors.

That’s the point of my Xconomy column from yesterday. Last Tuesday, I completed three weeks of jury service on a medical malpractice trial in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston. It was a heart-wrenching case that pitted an elderly pastor from a Boston suburb against three doctors who treated him during an infection-related crisis seven years ago. The plaintiff’s attorney argued, among other things, that the doctors failed to order the proper imaging studies that would have detected the infection that ultimately inflicted permanent damage on the pastor’s spinal cord, leaving him disabled.

Now, obviously the pastor and his family are the ones who have suffered all these years with the consequences of the episode. The burden on the 14 jurors was, by comparison, negligible. But the experience did give all of us a disturbing look inside both the medical system and the malpractice system, and forced us to make an awkward and difficult choice. In the end, what we had to decide was not whether the pastor deserved some kind of compensation for the obvious shortcomings in the care he received, but whether the three doctors named as defendants in the suit were negligent.

Ultimately, we found that the evidence did not support this claim, which meant that the pastor and his family will get no damage award. It was the black-or-white, all-or-nothing nature of the decision we had to make that bothered me and, I believe, the other jurors. It was obvious that the pastor’s various caregivers made decisions all along the line that, in retrospect, were the wrong ones. Yet it was impossible for the jury to conclude in this case that missing a diagnosis constituted malpractice, or to pin responsibility on any single individual in the chain.

In the end, “justice” was served, but fairness was not. I emerged from the trial feeling that we’d performed our duty well as jurors, given the limits within which we were forced to navigate. But I also feel a heightened cynicism about the malpractice system, which (no offense to the excellent attorneys involved in this case) seems mainly designed to prop up the incomes of lawyers. It’s too bad malpractice reform wasn’t a part of President Obama’s healthcare reform package. There might be more pressure for change if it the flaws in the system were exposed to wider view, instead of just 14 jurors at a time.