Today we digress slightly to discuss an article that appeared in the New York Times a couple of days ago. The legal system has gone to great lengths to establish an orderly trial process that tightly controls the information presented to juries. Now, litigants are finding that jurors are conducting their own shadow trials -- engaged in independent research through Google or Wikipedia, or discussing deliberations with friends through Twitter. The phenomenon, as reported by the Times, has led to mistrials in significant cases. Ironically, the court system in New York has installed WiFi in various Courts as a service to serving jurors. No good deed...?
We used to lock up jurors in New York. Okay, not lock up exactly. Juries in felony trials -- serious criminal cases -- were sequestered, meaning that the jury stayed in a hotel until the trial ended. Jurors were sequestered to prevent them reading news reports about cases or discussing the case with family and friends. Easy enough, before the Internet that is. If we still sequestered juries, all laptops, Blackberrys and other devices with the ability to connect wirelessly to the Internet would be confiscated.
Maybe we should lock offending jurors up again, only for real this time. Or maybe there should be fines for engaging in independent research. Seem too harsh? Litigants who spend tens of thousands of dollars on trials might not think so.
What should trial lawyers do? What can they do? Monitor Twitter, among other sites, for evidence that jurors are discussing the case? Is there any mechanism to discover whether jurists are using other resources, like Wikipedia or Google?
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