Jurors are instructed by the judge not to discuss the case with anyone until after a verdict is returned. It doesn’t seem to a terribly unclear instruction, but given the wealth of opportunity to “interact” with others, known and unknown these days, perhaps the word “discuss” no longer covers it. At least it didn’t for a juror in Burnley Crown Court in Lancastershire, England, according to this post at The Social on CNet, linking to that stalwart of fine British journalism, The Sun.
A British woman has reportedly been kicked off a jury for posting a “note” on Facebook asking her friends what they thought of the trial.
She was given the boot after the court received a tip about the posting.
What was she thinking? Likely what so many jurors before her were thinking, that it’s hard to sit in judgment of another person. Sure, it’s very easy to have the answer when you have no responsibility for the consequences of your actions. We’re all brilliant when our opinions don’t matter, but it’s an entirely different ballgame when your vote, guilty or not, actually matters.
But that fails to explain the juror’s choice of where to turn for help. A poll on Facebook? Well, that’s something Oliver Cromwell never considered. From the allfacebook blog :
The woman was torn regarding the court case involving child abduction and sexual assault. The note published on Facebook was set as public, meaning any Facebook member could see her poll. Though I can’t imagine that even a private note would have been the ethical thing to do. Had the note been private, however, perhaps the woman wouldn’t have gotten caught and subsequently kicked off the jury.
We’ve now turned the corner from how to get off a jury, the typical question for those who dread being compelled to do their civic duty, to the new question, how to post a poll on Facebook and not get caught.
There are no doubt going to be new, unanticipated problems with the advent of “social media,” the gentle sounding name for creating a fictional life online with an unlimited number of people you’ve never met. Our fear in the past was that a juror, despite being instructed not to discuss a case, did so with their spouse, friend or next door neighbor. Now it’s essentially the rest of the online world.
Thankfully, this one opened her poll to the public, and was thus exposed. How many thought better of making it public, and polled only her closest online buddies we will never know. By creating this international controversy, it puts the problem on the radar of all judges and lawyers It’s clearly time to change the instructions to cover this, and means that we have yet another responsibility to check the internet each night during trial to see what our jurors are saying and doing. Like we had too much free time during trial before.
On the plus side, at least it was on Facebook and not Twitter. That would have been really controversial.
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So, like, you’re not a big fan of the tweetjury plugin?
First, I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t in beta. Second, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone did suggest that trials be tweetavised and then the verdict tweeted. It could happen, but lawyers would have to ask shorter questions.
When I was a juror, I found the instruction not to discuss the case a little puzzling, at least in theory. After all, if I were to blog about each day’s testimony, I would only be repeating public knowledge, so it’s hard to see the harm. Reading the comments, on the other hand…
If you were a juror on my trial, what you describe and how you describe it would provide me with extraordinary information about what you were thinking, how witnesses were perceived, etc. This would be unbelievably useful information to me, and I would refocus what I was doing to appeal to you. Remember, I only need one juror to hang a jury. So the harm is in the insight you would provide, even if you didn’t think you were doing anything more than repeating what was pubic knowledge.
Yeah, I thought of that right after posting my comment. I was thinking in terms of revealing stuff to friends or the general public. I forgot that a blogging juror is also providing feedback to the lawyers.
It seems to me that the whole reason we have jury trials is to allow the public to overturn any prosecution that average people find unreasonable, as in the case of William Penn.
Therefore, every defendant is entitled to inform a jury of any fact he feels would lead some or all of them to find that prosecuting him is unjust. If a judge prevents that from happening, he has effectively cheated the defendant of his right to trial by jury.
In the present day, this kind of cheating is all too common. Juries are prevented from hearing that a defendant was entrapped, or is (for instance) a medical marijuana user with a state permit, or is being framed by a crooked informant, or is facing life in prison for a trivial crime under a “3 Strikes” law.
If I’m a juror, then, I regard it as my duty to find out these things and use them, *especially* when the judge says I can’t.
Any juror who obeys that judge and rubber-stamps an unjust verdict as a result might as well be a @$#%.
[Edited to remove inappropriate and unnecessary reference. Content, for better or worse, remains intact.]