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Juror's Tweets Overturn Trial Verdict
D H NG writes "The Arkansas Supreme Court had overturned a murder conviction due to a juror tweeting during the trial. Erickson Dimas-Martinez was convicted in 2010 of killing a teenager and was sentenced to death. His lawyers appealed the case on account of a juror tweeting his musings during the trial and because another juror nodded off during the presentation of evidence. Tweets sent include 'The coffee here sucks' and 'Court. Day 5. here we go again.' In an opinion, Associate Justice Donald Corbin wrote 'because of the very nature of Twitter as an... online social media site, Juror 2's tweets about the trial were very much public discussions.' Dimas-Martinez is to be given a new trial."
I've got jury duty next week.
I'll have to remember not to complain about the coffee.
Obviously this is becoming a problem because you don't need to be on the phone to be on the phone anymore, simple solution is to give the juror's an emergency hotline number to pass out (if the mom dies or something) and take away the damned phones during trial.
Contrary to popular belief you will not die if you are not able to operate a telephone computer device for the length of a day.
I can understand why jurors shouldn't receive outside information about the trial (though have a personal bone over expecting experts to magically forget everything they know for the purposes of serving on a jury).
But non-detail-bearing outbound messages? Seriously, so what? That has no effect on the actual trial or the defendant's ability to enjoy the due process of law leading to a more-or-less fair verdict.
Any type of incident such as this should be considered obstruction of justice, or at least contempt of court, and should come with a fine and/or jail sentence(if only a few days). Jurors not paying attention or disregarding orders can cost lives (either by sentencing an innocent man to death, or freeing an actual murderer and allowing him to kill again). Jury duty is not something that should be taken lightly, and is one of the few things the government asks you to do in regards to civic duty. A lot of people can't even do this right, or don't want to. People want so much from the government, but they can't even be bothered to do one simple thing like pay attention and do your duty.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I didn't even know you were allowed to have your phone with you. I haven't personally had jury duty, but the rest of my family has and they said they were told to leave their phones in their cars. In fact, my family didn't even tell each other about any details of the case until after the trial, and we never asked. None of our business.
It boggles the mind that people think these things are okay. I don't know when or where I learned it, but I have it ingrained in me that until the trial is over, what happens in court, stays in court. Including how bad the coffee is.
That juror is a moron and deserves punishment. If I was the family of the murdered kid, I would be furious and incredibly upset. I'm sure he'll get convicted again anyway, but that's not the point. Having to go through the process again, especially after hearing the first time the guilty verdict. That has got to suck.
Or sentence the jurors to the maximum sentence possible, based on the criminal charges against the defendant.
No, that's too harsh. I say that, if you are caught doing this during the course of a trial, you are removed, your replacement comes in, and you are confined for the rest of the trial. If it comes out after a trial that you did this and there is a mistrial/retrial, then you should be confined for the duration of that trial. That way people realize that this is a serious duty.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Arguably, the fact that the jurors had their phones with them provided valuable evidence of them absolutely not giving a fuck about a fairly important matter(It's only some guy being charged with murder, this isn't going to be on the test, right your honor?). In a way, it might be more valuable to leave people the means to easily and verifiably show that they are slacking off, rather than force them to slack off in more silent ways...
Seriously, tweeting about coffee and falling asleep during presentation of evidence, in a case about something slightly graver than a parking ticket?
I suppose the downside of a jury of one's peers is that one's peers are dangerously likely to be fuckwits with an attention span challenged by most commercial breaks...
Read the full opinion. The trial decision was reversed and remanded for many reasons, only one of which was juror misconduct. The juror misconduct charge came about from the juror not following the judge's direction not to use social media. The judge actually determined that the tweets did not harm the defendant.
While I tend to agree with you about jury nullification, what about this?
Muslim man kils his wife because she attempts to divorce him. Jury picked from the local population, which just happens to be a mostly Muslim community, refuses to convict him of murder because they believe, contrary to the law of the land, that his actions were justified.
Food for thought.
On television, you get a lot of people who don't say "it depends." I'd rather have my friends say "it depends" about most things--there is nuance in life.
Especially on an issue like jury nullification, there are MASSIVE reasons why sometimes it should be used and sometimes it should not be. If your police are being abusive or your prosecutors are prosecuting people they have no business prosecuting or your legislature is passing unjust laws or your judge is not giving someone a fair trial, it may be that jury nullification is your best option as a juror.
On the other hand, jury nullification is most often used as a tool of a racist to show solidarity with a defendant from his or her race, rather than for a reasoned moral purpose. This is blatant racism and is bad.
Though the latter is more frequent than the former, the importance of the former--and the administrative problem with preventing jury nullification while still allowing the jury to have any meaningful power--is significant.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I don't think you understand the word duty its something you must do. Even if you were not compensated at all it would still be your duty. Occasional jury duty is just one of the many prices we must pay for living in a free society.
Look at this way unlike your taxes, which are all to often stolen by some corporate welfare fat cat, at some justice will be done when you serve on jury.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
How about we split the difference and call it contempt of court?
You know, that crime that already exists, and doesn't run afoul of the 8th Amendment?
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Frankly, I don't see any problem with the scenario you described?
A court case involving a jury *should* be about what they believe took place (or didn't take place), based upon all of the evidence and arguments brought before them. If the engineer types are fixated on scientific evidence showing a person incinerated his wife's body so want to find him guilty, but nobody else on that jury is sold on it for whatever other reasons -- then perhaps the guy should go free?
It's the job of the prosecutor to convince the jury that the evidence supports his claims. Not everyone has a technical background, and not everyone who does is very good at thinking "outside the box" either, in cases where maybe there's an alternate explanation for the events to the one they're so certain took place by focusing strictly on the technical details?
Scientists and engineers are wrong sometimes, after all. We have bridges that collapsed shortly after being built, presumably by engineers who were confident they constructed it in a sound manner.....
I don't tweet, but I have served on several juries. The judge always admonishes the jury to not discuss the trial until after it's over. The judge does not prevent any and all contact with other people, only contact related to the proceedings. Tweeting is not much different than talking and this juror was not sequestered and not talking about the case. I see this as a bad decision. (I cannot read the whole decision itself. Only the first few pages appear at the link from TFA.)
Have you ever been on jury duty? I was on a case that ran for a week. For about 80% of the time, we weren't in the courtroom - the lawyers were arguing about legal technicalities that the jury wasn't allowed to hear before the judge ruled who was right. On a number of days, we came in, went into the court for its opening, went straight to the jury room, and stayed there for the entire day, returning to the court only for its close at the end of the day. It was even a fairly open and shut case as far as the jury was concerned. And it was bloody boring. If I hadn't had some sort of way to pass the time, I would have gone bonkers. As it was, I brought a book. These days, since I tend to read ebooks on my phone, I would not be impressed if they took it away and made me sit and stare at a wall all day.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Jury nullification is also a great way to enact tyranny of the majority. How many white people went to jail for lynching black people in the thirties? And then there's this case where it's kind of hard to avoid the implication that the jury thought it was okay to kill gays.
Jury nullification yes, can be used to fight oppression by the system, like the Fugitive Slave Law. But it's also great for trial-by-popularity-contest. The entire point of jury nullification is "screw the rules, I'm going to do what's 'right'". Sometimes that works, but jury nullification makes no distinction between good parts of the system, and bad parts.
Many parts of the system are there to protect the fair interests of justice. Juries can nullify them too. The rules over what evidence is admissible, for example - most juries aren't physically sequestered in a room with no phone and no internet the entire duration of the trial. They can easily search the internet for all kinds of half-baked "evidence". The judge is supposed to keep all that out of court, because it's unverified, or scientifically dubious, etc.
Jury nullification is an incredibly dangerous thing. It is not justice at all, because it is fundamentally capricious in nature. Justice is supposed to be the same for everybody.