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Lawyer Demands Jury Stops Googling
coomaria noted an unsurprising story about how courts are having problems with jurors Googling during cases. As anyone who has ever been called for jury duty knows, you aren't allowed to get outside information about the case you are hearing, but apparently the iPhone makes it far too easy to ignore this advice. A lawyer is trying to get jurors to sign a form explicitly stating they won't "use 'personal electronic and media devices' to research or communicate about the case." Of course, I'm not exactly sure why a juror should need to sign something for your iPhone but not a newspaper.
You're not supposed to read the newspaper either.
Actually...
That's is why a jury is allowed to ask questions and ask for read back of testimony during jury deliberations. A juror might google segregation, read the first sentence or two, and think that Plessy v. Ferguson is still good law.
To add to this excellent post, it is also critical as a means of keeping law enforcement in line. If the police obtain evidence by means of unlawful search and seizure, the judge can and should ban that evidence from being presented in court. It isn't banned from being printed in the media though; free speech and all.
The defense and prosecution attorneys are biased against each other and both will be experts in questioning witnesses. Together, they do a better job of grilling the witnesses than the jury could hope to do. All the jury has to do is listen, take notes, and come to a decision.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Yes. That is also why jurors are not supposed to reach decisions on matters of law, only matters of fact. If the jury members need to understand the legalese someone is doing something wrong.
caritj.org
Yes, because if you were on trial accused of dealing drugs, you would want the jury to know you were arrested for smoking pot even though the judge in the trial said it was not relevant to the case. And, then when they found you guilty, even though you were innocent because they had developed a biased opinion of you from their internet research, I am sure you will have no problem with it.
Just like if you were arrested at 17 for statutory rape of your 18yo girlfriend (yes, this is possible), you would want the jury to know that you were arrested for rape when a woman IDs you as her rapist, even though there is no physical evidence and little circumstantial evidence and the judge has ruled that your previous arrest (and possible conviction) is not germane to the case.
OH, and I am sure you would want jurors reading blogs that say "He did it! We know he did it! The police just screwed up the case!" while deciding your fate.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Except you can't really fix things. Languages evolve and change no matter what.
Rome tried to fix the language, and basically the result was that it split into two increasingly diverging languages. Increasingly the language of the common folk, the so called "Vulgar Latin" had less and less to do with what you'd nowadays think of Classical Latin. Unless you were of senatorial class (by empire times it had become a hereditary class) or had some other reason to learn the official form, you probably didn't and it would sound as funny to you as your quote above to a modern English speaker.
The Greeks tried the same with, well, Greek and it too split.
English itself is an example of precisely the results of the idiocy of trying to stop language evolution. At one point English was actually phonetic. E.g., "knight" was really read as it's written, i.e., with a short "i" like in "time" and with the "k" and "g" and "h" actually pronounced. I.e., akin to the German "knecht". But language kept changing. From that word it turned into the modern one which sounds like "night". But due to stupidly trying to stick to the old form, the written form didn't change too, and English writing by and large stopped being phonetic. You're back to, basically, words being hieroglyphs that offer you no indication of how it's pronounced. It's using a phonetic alphabet, but phonetic it ain't any more.
And what was the gain? As I was saying, language still evolved anyway. Words changed, meanings changed, constructs changed, etc. That didn't stop at all. Just the orthography increasingly became an arbitrary bunch of letters that are associated with that word for nothing more than historical reasons.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.