Lawyers Using Facebook Research For Jury Selection

unassimilatible writes "Trial lawyers are increasingly using social networking sites like Facebook to research jurors in real-time during the voir dire process. Armando Villalobos, the district attorney of Cameron County, Brownsville, Texas, last year equipped his prosecutors with iPads to scan the Web during jury selection. But what of the jurors who have their privacy settings restricted to 'friends only?' Mr. Villalobos has thought of a potential workaround: granting members of the jury pool free access to the court's wi-fi network in exchange for temporarily 'friending' his office. Faustian bargain, or another way to get out of jury duty?"

Comments

Don't know about facebook...

[ak_hepcat]

But I do know that they're watching twitter.

I sent out a tweet, during one my last jury selection, at lunchtime, that we were in the middle of jury selection.

no specifics, just a "we're at this point in the process"

After lunch, I was called into the chambers and dismissed, because they had seen my tweet and were afraid that I might
engage in "too much" social media and release too much information.

I was surprised that showed up on court that quickly, actually. I don't know how they found it, but I assume
that they're performing near constant searches using jurors names.

Re:IANAL

[Collapsing Empire]

Sodomy was made legal by the supreme court.

Re:Doesn't pass the smell test

[amicusNYCL]

Jurors should be selected by lot, and reach their verdict by majority vote, not "consensus".

That's a terrible idea if your goal is to have the jury reach the "correct" verdict. When everyone has to agree the chances are much higher that the result will be more accurate. I was on a jury where we started out around 50%/50% after closing arguments, and it took quite a bit of discussion to get everyone to understand what was said, what the evidence was, and what our instructions were. There were several people who thought the guy was guilty because he wasn't a very likable guy, but it turns out that the combination of the evidence, the timeline presented by the prosecution, and most importantly our instructions from the judge forced a verdict of not guilty. If we had voted on it at the start, that guy would be in jail now.