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Courts Move To Ban Juror Use of Net, Social Sites
coondoggie passes along a NetworkWorld report on the pronouncement of a judicial conference committee recommending that trial judges specifically instruct jurors not to use any electronic communications devices or sites during trial and deliberations. Here's the committee report (PDF). "If you think you're going to use your spanking new iPhone to entertain yourself next time you're on jury duty, think again. Judges are going to take an even dimmer view of jury member use of Blackberry, iPhone, or other electronic devices as a judicial policy-setting group has told district judges they should restrict jurors from using electronic technologies to research or communicate. ... The instructions state jurors must not use cell phones, e-mail, Blackberry, iPhone, text messaging, or on Twitter, or communicate through any blog or website, through any internet chat room, or by way of any other social networking websites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and YouTube."
How is this different than any other method of sequestering a jury? It makes perfect sense to me, human nature being what it is.
This is surprising how?
Such use has resulted in mistrials, exclusion of jurors, and imposition of fines. ... The instructions state jurors must not [...] communicate through any blog or website, through any internet chat room, or by way of any other social networking websites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Because we all know Facebook and YouTube are full of impartial people who know anything about case law.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Just wear a T-Shirt that says "Jury" on the front and "Nullification" on the back.
Yeah, I'm certainly not going to agree to being sentenced to weeks of solitary confinement without having myself been accused of a crime. Even prisoners get to receive visitors and make phone calls.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Specifically, those instruction spell out that jurors should not you should not consult dictionaries or reference materials, search the internet, websites, blogs, or use any other electronic tools to obtain information either before the trial, during deliberations or after until the judge instructs otherwise.
Okay, maybe if jurors were required to pass some type of basic test that indicates they have a reasonable understanding of basic terms this would make sense, but denying the use of dictionaries makes no sense at all. How in the world is a "normal" person supposed to know when the judge or attorney is trying to pull a fast one when they aren't even allowed to research what is being said?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
It occurs to me that having a T-shirt saying "GUILTY" should be a pretty good way of getting yourself excluded. ;-)
to put it politely, bollocks...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Yea, you tell them. I love masturbating and if I had to stop for days or even weeks because I was on a jury, I'd probably shoot up the place...wait, what ingrained habits were you referring to again?
If they remake the movie "12 Angry Men" (like everything else these days), the story will be about 12 angry men who are kept locked up in a jury room with no access to their online porn.
Serving as a juror is a responsibility as a US citizen, and whatever you get paid for doing so is an honorarium, not a salary. Payments for pain and suffering, on the other hand, are generally settlements for tort liabilites, and the honorarium you receive for completing jury duty is not compensation for completing jury duty. It is so that the normal expenses that you would not otherwise suffer (such as lunch and parking) become a net cost of 0.
News flash - you don't get paid for voting either.
If more people who don't use the internet end up being jurors, I assume it will either have no effect or would improve the ability of jurors to listen to the facts of individual cases, as they are supposed to be doing in determining their verdicts. One of the main purposes of a jury is so that outside influences (such as newspapers, television, and internet) are not influential. It would be more like only people who have not determined their personal stance on the death penalty being allowed on a capital case. If only pro death-penalty (your idea is just stupid) people were allowed on a capital case, the defending lawyer would simply be getting a free shot at getting his client off, because a death verdict would be thrown out pretty much automatically on appeal.
I know about the artificial separation of judges deciding law and jurors deciding fact, but forget that for a moment.
Jurors are presumably supposed to use their judgment to decide the facts -- are the witnesses trustworthy, is their testimony full of inconsistencies, how do different witness's testimonies stack up against each other ...
But all this REQUIRES that jurors use their own knowledge to some extent. If a witness says something that is obviously wrong to a car mechanic but not an ice cream clerk, that mechanic darned well better tell the other jurors why he thinks the witness is lying. Jurors are expected to NOT drop their real-world knowledge at the door. (I am particularly thinking of My Cousin Vinny, where only a car fanatic would know vital clues about the tire tracks and what kind of car could have made them.)
Now how is this different from a juror who knows just enough to be wary of something and looks it up (NOT during the trial, but at home, or even during deliberations)? It's all fine and dandy to say that is up to the opposing lawyer to handle, that jurors are not police or investigators, but that is word games. If I knew something before the trial, I am expected to use that knowledge to uncover bad testimony. But if I acquire that knowledge during the trial, I am supposed to pretend I don't know that a witness is lying?
Maybe a case can be made for looking up a witness's past history, but even then I don't think so. If I knew a witness personally before the trial, knew he had a history of lying, knew he hated the defendant or was jealous of him or was in love with him, whatever kind of influence you can think of, that is part of my knowledge and part of how I decide what is true and what is false. Even if the only reputation they have is from always appearing in newspapers under unsavory conditions, I am not expected to forget all that when evaluating their testimony. And yes, I am ignoring the idea that prior criminal history is not supposed to be part of a defendant's current trial, but I also think that is bunk -- if some guy has been to jail a half dozen times for beating people up, that sure as heck is significant.
This all stems from olden times when jurors had no way of looking things up, and very little need. But the world is more complicated now, people know more and get around more, and I'd rather be tried by jurors who knew how to look up things for themselves rather than sit around like stupified monkeys.
Infuriate left and right
Darned tooting he read what you wrote -- did you?
Third, you do not have the right to nullify a trial, it is illegal to do so.
You said jury nullification is illegal in the US. It isn't. Judges may disallow lawyers telling the jury they have the right, but it is legal. Here, from the wikipedia link.
A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.[33] In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify.[34] In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction that "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification."[35] In 1997, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b).[36] The Supreme Court has not recently confronted the issue of jury nullification.
Infuriate left and right
Then you're a perfect candidate for jury duty. They like the dumb ones.
The summary here contains a pullquote that has been specifically edited in a misleading way to turn what is basically a non-story into a story.
The summary says:
Pay close attention to the ellipses after "communicate".
This quote appears to be from the committee report, but the committee report link is broken; it contains no href, just anchor tags.
The article says:
Not convinced yet? Here is the complete first paragraph from the committee report mentioned, but NOT linked to, in the quote contained in the summary:
Emphasis is mine in previous two quotations. In other words, you are not banned from using these devices or services. The article mentions that you may not use these things to discuss or research the case. The networkworld article uses the inflammatory word "ban" in its headline (inappropriately) and the Slashdot post goes even further, deliberately eliminating context crucial to understanding the actual guidelines and replacing them with ellipses.
Then you will go to prison if they catch you, and I, for one, hope they do.
Only an utter arsehole would want to undermine the jury system on the basis that it's a little bit inconvenient because you can't get your daily lolcats fix.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Fuck it, let's just abolish the jury system entirely, since all it does is get in the way of my TV watching.
Obviously anyone in court is guilty or they wouldn't be there, so let's just let the judge decide on the sentence and stop all that time-wasting with so-called "evidence" and the frankly tedious process of allowing a "defence".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Raises hand in court. "I have a question. I was surfing the web on my phone last night, googling the defendent's name..."
Would that be good enough to get kicked out of the jury during the middle of the trial?
Oh, and don't forget those sites that you can pay for background information about people.
If you're going to pull a stunt like that, do it when they are selecting, not in the middle of the trial. What you describe is just being an asshole messing with people's lives.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Yeah, I'm certainly not going to agree to being sentenced to weeks of solitary confinement without having myself been accused of a crime. Even prisoners get to receive visitors and make phone calls.
Watch out, refusing to serve jury duty is punishable by jail time ...
No jury would convict on that!
In Texas, it is defined as contempt of court and only requires the judge to sentence you.. no trial involved.