There's a Problem In the Silk Road Trial: the Jury Doesn't Get the Internet

sarahnaomi (3948215) writes "The trial began this week for Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texas man accused of being the mastermind behind the dark net drug market, Silk Road. But as the jury began hearing testimony in the case, it was clear the technological knowledge gap would impede the proceedings. Judge Katherine Forrest said right off the bat when the case began that "highly technical" issues must be made clear to the jury. "If I believe things are not understandable to the average juror, we will talk about what might be a reasonable way to proceed at that time," she said. After the first day of proceedings, Forrest told the prosecution to be more clear with explanations of concepts central to the case, noting she was unhappy with its "mumbo-jumbo" explanation of the anonymizing service Tor. She also requested all readings of chat transcripts include emoticons."

Comments

The Only Concept Juries Need To Understand

[Tokolosh]

Jury Nullification

http://www.vocativ.com/underwo...

Re:Jury of your peers

[Chris Mattern]

In fact, "jury of your peers" is British, not American. It means commoners get tried by a jury of commoners, whereas a lord is tried by jury of lords--usually the entire House of Lords convened as a jury, in fact. That happened very rarely; one can see a fictional account of how such a trial would be conducted in Dorothy Sayer's Clouds of Witnesses. Even in Britain, this is now obsolete, as the old legal distinctions of subject, commoner and lord are largely abolished; one is simply a British citizen, now.

Re:Jurors

[Geoffrey.landis]

Ambiguity is safer for the defense, not the prosecution. The prosecution has to demonstrate that a crime occurred and how that crime was carried out, beyond a reasonable doubt. If the prosecutor cannot describe, beyond a reasonable doubt, how the crime was conducted then the prosecutor will probably fail to get a conviction.

No, that's not true-- formally, they have only to show that a crime occurred. (That's called corpus delicti-- which, despite popular misconception, does not require a corpse.)

However, what they do have to show is how they know that the defendant is the one who did the crime. If understanding how they know this means they need to explain an internet investigation unmasking Tor anonymization, they may very well need some technical explanations.