juries don't determine damages, only that damages occurred as evidenced. Similarly, jurors don't determine guilt or innocence, but determines whether the presented evidence from both parties are convincing. Judges determine innocence or guilt, and also hands down sentences.
I've heard (but you should verify - IANAL) that jurors often err on the side of not sentencing in civil matters.
Judges tend to think that everything should be resolved by the court, after all - they are paid to be there. Jurors tend to think that people should just sort things out without dragging innocent bystanders into a jury box.
Also, people with legal training are taught to think everything deserves compensation, and the only question is who to bill.
Don't try to understand the US legal system: you would risk damaging your brain. Almost no other country uses juries in civil cases. Almost no other country has "punitive damages".
I'm curious about another root problem: why are corporate civil cases heard by a jury in the first place? Never mind that juries are bound to be influenced when billions of dollars are at stake[1], how about the fact that these cases are both technically and legally complex?
I'm not an expert in this stuff but as far as I can tell the USA is unique in allowing juries to hear this sort of trial, even among countries with a right to jury in a criminal trial.
1. E.g. the Samsung skating rink in front of the Marshall Texas courthouse
Juries are completely inappropriate tools for the job of deciding civil trials. Like lots of things that are crazy in the US the Americans did it as a perverse imitation of how England did it back when they became independent.
Today nobody else does this, England for example only really uses jury trial to decide serious criminal cases (for minor stuff there isn't a professional judge at all, a panel of lay magistrates decides, they mostly seem disappointed rather than angry - like parents whose teenager was caught smoking).
I was a juror on a very small case. A previous trial assigned guilt. Our trial was to determine damages.
It was eye opening for me. We were not allowed to know things like medical bills and costs the victim incurred. We were forced to choose some number without having an basis for establishing the magnitude. I still don’t know if we were too high or too low.
Juries are a component of common law (and not used in all common law countries at that), and the vast majority of the world runs on the civil law system (which is, IMHO, better).
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