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Should Smartphones Be Allowed In Court?
coondoggie writes "Federal courts have been debating how much freedom users of smartphones and portable wireless devices in general should have in a federal courthouse. Some say they should be banned outright, while others say they should be allowed, but their use curtailed (PDF). Unregulated use of smartphones has resulted in mistrials, exclusion of jurors and fines in some case."
No different then cameras or other recording devices in most courts.
Leave them at the door.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
in my local courthouse for several years, due to fear of courtroom observers using texting to coordinate witness testimony. That decision was made when the clerk of court's teenage son showed him that he could text with his phone in his shirt pocket.
It's the behavior that's wrong, not the technology. You can ban smartphones, but then you'll be banning tablets, then watches, then glasses with microdisplays, etc.
Treat the problem, not the symptom.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget jurors are sometimes sequestered with no access to any type of news so they are not "contaminated" by mass media or other type of news. At least in those cases, smart phones would be a big no-no.
They are sometimes allowed to get newspapers although where the articles regarding the trial they are involved in are removed when they are sequestered for weeks.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I have a friend who practiced in the U.S. District Court in Mass. Early on he had a Windows Mobile phone, which of course he kept his schedule. When the Court was banning cell phones, he would have to get permission from the court so that he could check his schedule on his phone, as did opposing counsel.
In Los Angeles, they would ban cell phones with cameras for a while, for non-attorneys. This was stopped between 2008 and 2010. I suspect that since most people have their schedules on their phones, it would make it very hard to schedule any proceedings if phones were banned.
As far as jurors, there must be some restriction on information access/communications during the period that they are on a jury (as opposed to being in the pool). Not only so that they are untainted, but also so they are undistracted.
Camera Phones don't take pictures, people take pictures.
Fight Spammers!
Of course, what we get in the US is a predominance of both of these sorts of jurors. They watch a lot of TV and are sure they have stumbled into something interesting. Or they are there because there isn't anything else interesting to do at the rest home. Worse, they didn't want to serve, couldn't think of a way out of it and now are there and are very, very hostile about it - he must be guilty or he wouldn't have been arrested, can we go now?
The smartphone is of use to both these sorts of people and in neither case is it useful or helpful but is actually very, very damaging to the system. And if you happen to be the guy on trial with 10 of these sorts of jurors you are going to be very angry at the guilty verdict.
Perhaps they should spend that idle time pondering the importance of the decisions they will be making and the impacts those decisions will have on the various parties involved -- and taking stock of their own capacity to be objective, their own internalized biases, and personal foibles, in order to offer a fairer verdict at the end of the process. Instead of playing Angry Birds. Just a thought.
A pen and notepad is not a broadcasting device. And use of many other recording devices is restricted: you will often only see hand-drawn illustrations of court cases because cameras were not allowed in the courthouse.
So, you think it's okay for jurors to, on their own, access information pertinent to the case, without giving the defense or prosecution an opportunity to examine that information and discuss it in court? You think people should be convicted based on secret information their attorneys didn't even know about? Nice...
So are you saying they should throw out all rules for evidence such as speculation, hearsay, conjecture, etc.?
Jurors are charged with making a ruling based on the evidence presented not the "evidence" they can Google.
I practice before the federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia at Alexandria, and they do not allow anyone, including lawyers, to bring their smartphones in. It's routine to have to look at your calendar on the fly when the judge wants to schedule something, so you have to have it with you. The EDVA policy is the main reason I still maintain a paper calendar parallel to my computer calendar.
I understand and buy into the rationale behind not letting jurors bring them in, but the state courts in the area almost universally allow lawyers to bring their smartphones in, and it's such a bonus.
Might I advise against getting a Windows Phone?
Whether the judge controls the information is beside the point. The point is, the defense needs the opportunity to address the information in court. I don't understand how replacing one potential problem with a much, much bigger problem helps anything.
Yeah, but after 5 minutes thought, then what?
It's not really a surprise no one wants to be a juror, you're treated almost like the prisoner in some case, cut off from the world and with shitty pay to boot.
When I served on a jury the bailiff collected our cell phones before the trial and gave them back afterward. They also provided all writing materials and collected them when the trial was over. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
How can it be less clear? The whole point of a trial is that the jury does NOT have unfettered access to information.
First and most obvious are the rules of evidence - if you are on trial, do you want the jury to have access to the results of an illegal search that just happened to be 'leaked'? Do you want the jury to search the papers and find that you have been charged with the same type of offense before?
Next is the constitutional right to confront your accuser. A juror looking up information on his own is not giving the defense a chance to rebut the information. Also, the defense (or even the prosecution) would not have prior knowledge of what things a juror was looking up, so they would not have time to prepare a proper rebuttal (get expert witnesses, etc).
Giving jurors access to information outside the courtroom is just an awful idea.
But in real life, all you have to say to be disqualified from a juror role is that you can't stand any type of criminality and that any criminal should be sentenced to death even if he is only suspected of a crime.
When's the last time you sat on a jury? I once saw a guy try to pull the old "I hate all niggers" routine, which is only slightly more obvious than what you suggest. The judge asked him whether he wouldn't be able to put aside his preconceptions and evaluate the case fairly. He said no he would not. The judge reminded him of his obligations as a juror. He persisted with his tactic -- which, no doubt, the judge had seen a hundred times before. The judge ended up holding him in contempt of court.
Breakfast served all day!
We need to realize that it's not practical to keep people in the dark and start designing trials to counter this.
Either that, or we need to keep doing what we do now: Expect jurors to act like adults, respect the rule of law, and obey the instructions of the judge. And if they don't, they're dismissed, fined, and the defendant is potentially entitled to a new trial because his defense was poisoned by a misbehaving juror.
So once again, design a new form of trial where jurors' biases and ignorance (which are, of course, society's biases and ignorance) get addressed.
In all the times I've been called as a juror (and it happens every year without fail), I've found the current legal system is actually pretty good at this. Do you have experience otherwise?
Breakfast served all day!
You obviously haven't been a prisoner then - have you? I have! I spent 2 weeks going through a trial where there was not a single piece of evidence offered against me, other than one person's word again mine. At the end of that two weeks I was found guilty of a crime I didn't commit and got to spend the next 6 years, 8 months in prison because our legal system sucks.
Do you want to know how much time I spent during that period thinking about how sorry I felt for the jurors and how much they must have suffered like I was during their 2 weeks of jury service?
Do you? Really? Precisely zero seconds!!
How the hell did the parent comment get modded up, let alone as "insightful"? Unless it was modded as "Insightful into the mental state of the poster"?
Kind of sad, though. I mean, are you absolutely certain that you will never stand trial before a jury, for anything? And if not, who would you like to be on that jury?
Me, I honestly don't have a problem with sitting on a jury. Some people treat it like they're being drafted to Vietnam. It's not like that at all (and it happens to me every single year, so I know). It's a pain in the ass, but it's actually pretty interesting, and in the end it's seldom much of a drain on your time. Especially a criminal jury; criminal trials are usually short, and often last just a day or two. You're much more likely to get called for a strong-arm robbery or a drug sales charge than for a murder. (Civil trials, on the other hand, are a totally different matter, and can last months -- I dread the times I'm called for those.)
So to my previous point, fuck's sake -- these people who are on trial for these criminal charges, they're people just like you. A lot of them are scumbag criminals, but some of them didn't even do what they're charged with. This is the essence of our jury system: It's not some elitist racket designed to let people like you dodge being on jury duty. Rather, it's designed so that people like you will sit on juries so that people like you don't go to prison for breaking laws they never broke.
Breakfast served all day!