Jurors on the Internet: a dilemma for courts

By Maggie Clark, Stateline Staff Writer

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Most jurors are prohibited by judges or by state law from using cell phones, laptops or other electronic media to communicate about a case while they are trying it. But some just ignore the warnings.

This month the Arkansas Supreme Court overturned a guilty verdict in a capital murder case because a juror was tweeting about it while the case was being heard. A few days earlier, a California juror was dismissed after the court discovered she had posted extensively about the case and about the other jurors on her Facebook page.

This is a troubling time when it comes to the use of the Internet in the courtroom. Faced with rapidly changing technology, judges are struggling to keep jurors from getting and spreading information about current cases online. Doing online research on the defendant’s criminal record or consulting Facebook friends on a vote for sentencing might seem acceptable to some jurors, but it violates the oath “to base your verdict solely upon the evidence” as presented in the courtroom.

Personal Internet research can be just as dangerous a problem as social media use. In January of this year, a judge in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, was forced to acquit a man charged with homicide and first-degree murder in the death of a one-year-old, and declare a mistrial on a number of other counts, after the court found out a juror had independently done online research about injuries sustained by the victim, and possibly offered to share her knowledge with the other jurors.

All of this has happened in the wake of the 2009 “Google mistrial,” in which a Florida judge discovered that nine jurors in a federal drug case had been doing Internet research on the case, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial. Following that case, more than 30 states adopted new model jury instructions specifically barring jurors from researching or communicating about a case on the Internet while they are serving. But the problem remains widespread. In 2009 alone, judges granted new trials or overturned verdicts in 21 cases as a result of Internet-related juror activity, according to an analysis from Reuters Legal.

This month’s Arkansas Twitter episode was a complicated one. The State Supreme Court reversed the decision of a lower court judge, who allowed the murder conviction of Erickson Dimas-Martinez to stand even though a juror tweeted about the case several times after the lower court judge asked him to stop. (Another juror was observed sleeping through portions of testimony.) At 3:45 p.m. on April 1, 2010, the day of sentencing, Juror 2 tweeted, “It’s over.” But the jury did not announce that it had reached a sentence until 4:35 p.m., according to the Arkansas Supreme Court opinion.

Thoughts and musings

“Because of the very nature of Twitter as an online social media site,” wrote Associate Justice Donald Corbin in the Arkansas opinion, “Juror 2’s tweets about the trial were very much public discussions … it is in no way appropriate for a juror to state musings, thoughts, or other information about a case in such a public fashion.” Arkansas had updated its jury instructions in 2010 to prohibit Internet communication and research about an ongoing case, and the Court determined that Juror 2’s actions showed that he was willfully disregarding those instructions.

Even though a majority of states now prohibit Internet research or communication by jurors, studies have found that many jurors misconstrue the instructions or simply refuse to limit their Internet use during a trial. In a pilot study of 500 jurors across the country conducted by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), researchers found that even after jurors had been instructed that they could not tweet, email, use Facebook, or communicate electronically with friends or family members about a case, one-third of respondents either didn’t understand or incorrectly understood what they could and couldn’t do when it came to using the Internet while acting as a juror.

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Jurors on the Internet: a dilemma for courts

By Maggie Clark, Stateline Staff Writer

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