Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.