Trial by Google by KTK

Here’s a twist that doesn’t at all surprise me, but that I have to admit I hadn’t considered before: jurors are apparently Googling information about high-profile defendants in criminal cases, during the trial, in defiance of instructions to avoid press coverage. This guy has some telling evidence to help prove it.

Now we have a new player in celebrity trials, the Internet. Jurors are admonished to avoid the media, Internet or conversations connected to the cases they are asked to judge. It’s nearly impossible to police jury conduct. In low profile cases this particular kind of jury misconduct does not happen. . . .

In a low profile case several years ago I wrote [on a blog] about a justifiable shooting case in Hollywood. I wrote about the extensive criminal record and dubious immigration status of the so-called victim. That information was kept out of the trial and not transmitted to the jury.

More than a year had passed since that shooting and I noticed my web counter got 14 Los Angeles area hits on that forgotten story. I guessed why the sudden interest. The trial of the accused began and members of the jury were all doing Google searches on the defendant’s name! They had full access to the information the court ordered withheld and my opinion on just why this was a justifiable use of force.

That trial ended and I got an e-mail and phone call from the foreman of the jury telling me they acquitted the defendant! The IP address of that jury foreman matched that of a visitor to my site numerous times throughout the trial. . . .

I discovered an anti-Phil Spector hate campaign develop on the Court TV website and a Sherman Oaks woman’s blog that provided a true hatemonger’s view of the Spector case.

Juror Number Nine from the first Spector trial contacted this woman blogger the very day the trial ended in a mistrial. [NB: Juror Nine was quoted expressing personal disappointment at the hung-jury outcome, which some suggest indicates bias.] I remain convinced that this fellow who sought conviction was reading the Sherman Oaks based hate blog every night after the trial recessed.

[emphases added]

It’s obvious that this would be happening, when you think about it – which I hadn’t. But it adds a new twist to the old problem of jurors being exposed to information in the news. On the Web, it’s even easier to get information and opinion, and there’s vastly more of it available, than in ordinary media – but you have to seek it out. And when you do seek it out, it’s almost invariably from a particular perspective – you read the blogs that cater to your point of view, or you seek the information that you personally are interested in or think is relevant. Not only does that contaminate the trial process, but it turns it into a competition between the viewpoints, biases, and self-educated “analysis” of 12 different Web surfers, rather than a discussion among peers presented with a common set of evidence and a coherent legal framework. It would be like conducting a trial in the comments on a political blog. That’s absolutely terrifying, from a procedural-justice point of view.

Of course, two vague anecdotes don’t prove anything, but it’s hard not to imagine this sort of thing isn’t going on pretty extensively. Likely it will get worse as the new media become more pervasive and sophisticated. The blogger I link to suggests sequestering juries in every high-profile case, but that’s incredibly disruptive and expensive (and would soon lead to demands for sequestration in every case with an unpopular defendant, or to appeals based on the claim that the jury could have been contaminated because they were not). He also points out that you can try to trace illicit surfing and electronic contacts through such means as ISP logs, and suggests that that should be standard for every juror – but that would be expensive, time-consuming, and intrusive. I don’t know what to do, really, but it seems like a serious problem.