Back in January of this year, I wrote a post, “Jury Duty is NOT a Good Place to Go Social,” on why you just want to limit your use of web-enabled devices in the event you are called to serve on a jury. The idea is that jurors who decide to consult online resources for, say, information about the defendant’s possible criminal history or to sound out their FaceBook friends or Twitter followers about the case could be opening themselves to influences from sources other than just the evidence admitted in court. It’s a situation they call Google mistrial.
As I wrote at that time, a number of courts have taken steps to modify the instructions given to jurors at the outset of a trial to include specific prohibitions against not only reading newspaper articles or watching television news coverage referencing the trial, but also telling jurors not to do web research on the cases they are involved in. It’s become a recognized problem for the judiciary, now that so many of the citizenry use smartphones and iPads and cannot easily be separated from these devices.
Well, it was only a matter of time before the courts would do something more.
Now, according to an article in Monday’s New York Times, a federal judge in Manhattan has gone a step further, coming up with a written pledge that jurors serving in an upcoming criminal trial would be required to sign, promising not to use the Internet to search for information related to the trial or the defendant. Any juror who breaks the pledge will be subject to perjury charges.
This appears to be the first time such stringent measures have been taken to ensure that jury deliberations don’t become contaminated by outside information. But consider the potential volume of outside information available online about certain defendants — DSK, for instance, in the event he is ever tried in civil court.
As you might expect, in the Manhattan federal case, the defense was supportive of the pledge for jurors; they don’t want the jury exposed to any more of their client’s dirty laundry than that which the judge has ruled admissible in court. The prosecution, on the other hand, was rather lukewarm to the idea of a pledge, saying that the usual oral instructions ought to be able to address the concern.
In any case (so to speak), it remains to be seen just how effective a pledge might be in preventing Google mistrial.
But as the federal judge said of her prospective jury pool, “I can’t seize their computers and their BlackBerrys. I can’t lock them up. I can try to intimidate them.”