Twelve Twittering Men?
We here at the Law Blog have been called for jury duty several times (in New York City, it feels like an annual event), but have never been picked to sit. It’s probably a good thing, because, despite our legal training and basic understanding of how trials work, we’d find it excruciating to not be able to use Google (GOOG) to do our own research on issues that arise in the case.
So we’re a bit sympathetic to those jurors who are mucking up cases all over the country by researching, iPhoning, Blackberrying, Twittering–what have you–during trials despite prohibitions against such activities. Click here for today’s story on the situation, from the NYT’s John Schwartz.
The lead anecdote in Schwartz’s story is particularly evocative: Last week, a juror in a federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet. So the judge questioned the rest of the jury only to find that eight other jurors had been doing the same thing.
Read the rest of this post
