From time to time, we’ve had discussions here about the role of jurors, with some posters expressing the views that jurors should be able to bring their own factual infomration to the jury room to decide the case:
Testimony in Spanish, one juror peaks Spanish can lead to mistrial?
It’s apparently becoming more of an issue, with the prevalence of twitter, google, etc.
News story here: U.S. juror could face charges for online research:
Sequestering all juries would fix the problem, but it’s expensive and increases the burdens of jury service. Not sure if it’s possible to fix the problem with lesser measures, though.
Simple, really. Just stick a couple of these in the jury box and conference room, that should help.
The FCC would like a word with you, Mr. J.
There two questions here. One is access to information; the other is the role of a juror. Going on-line isn’t qualitatively different from picking up a newspaper overnight or reaching for an encyclopedia at home when the trial goes over one day.
What if there was a way for jurors to introduce evidence?
Am I the only one picturing a jury of Dopers saying ‘Cite?’ every three minutes?
I understand the sentiment behind your question, but that’s not what a juror’s role in a trial is. The juror is there to evaluate the evidence presented by the prosecution and the defense. In an adversarial system, the evidence is presented by the two sides, and a third party (the jury, guided in court by a neutral fact-finder, the judge) evaluates that evidence in order to determine whether or not the defendant is guilty.
Anyone presenting evidence at a trial is, by definition, doing so for the prosecution or for the defense. And a juror is, by definition, supposed to be impartial and not on the side of the prosecution or the defense. Jurors presenting evidence is fundamentally antithetical to the role of juror in the American judicial system.
Not anymore. 
Nowhere in the article does it state how much of a problem juror research was before the internet. I assumed jurors reading newspapers and watching TV news has always been an issue.
The article states that “Judge Gartley had explicitly and repeatedly warned jurors before court recesses not to conduct their own research, including on the Internet … Early in the trial, he said, she raised her hand and asked the judge if she could question a prosecution witness. The judge denied the request.”
While that’s true, before the Internet a single juror probably had access on a daily basis to no more than a handful of papers. With one search term and click, jurors now can access hundreds and hundreds of sources of information, some of which might be unvetted or pure speculation, some of which may not be valid, some of which may be inaccurate.
I think the issue with modern technology is the sheer amount of information, notwithstanding that even back when there wasn’t an Internet, it’s not the job of a juror to do back research into the case.
Not only that, but trials often happen weeks or months or even years after the actual event. In the era before the internet, getting access to information related to a trial might require a person to drag his or her ass to the local public library and sift through dozens of back issues of the newspaper, or scroll through reels of microfilm. Now, though, all you have to do is plug your search terms into a search engine, and there it is, even if it happened last month or last year.
This is the 21st century. Everybody and their grandmas have a smart phone and internet access. No matter how many rules prohibit it, people are curious and they will go online to find out. It’s something that would be too difficult and annoying for most people to do back 50 or 100 years ago, but as technology changes, the law has to change with it
The simplest, cheapest, and fairest way to solve this issue is to just let juries have that information. Prohibiting it is a relic of times when lawyers were respected members of the community and held as honest men seeking justice, not a punchline and almost as despised as politicians they are now. Stopping jurors from having that information simply means we want the best liar to win in the courtroom
Or, people could just obey the judge’s instructions and refrain from Googling the goddamn trial until after the thing is over. I’ve never been on a jury, and i’m sure it must be tempting to talk about the trial with friends, or to watch news reports about it, or to look it up on news websites, but i like to think that i could control myself for the week or two that most trials usually take.
While lawyers may have been more respected by the American public in the past, there was no golden age when they were simply “honest men seeking justice.” Lawyers have, in America as in most common law countries, a long history of trying to win their cases. That’s their job. They are advocates, not neutral arbiters or seekers of justice.
John Adams, describing his defense of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, called it “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” Adams was referring here not to some belief that lawyers are beholden to seek justice in the trial process, but to the fact that no other Boston lawyers would take the case, and that the adversarial system can only work if the defendants have someone to take their side and argue on their behalf, as their advocate, in the procedure.
There have been criticisms made of the adversarial system, arguing that it has inherent flaws, and that two sides making their respective cases in front of a neutral arbiter (judge and/or jury) does not always lead to justice. Some have also argued that the inquisitorial system, where the court itself acts as an investigating agent, can produce more accurate and more just outcomes. There are strong arguments to be made for and against both systems.
But, whatever criticism you might have of the American system, it is not reducible to an absurd and sophomoric argument about the perfidy of lawyers, which is essentially what you’ve provided here. It’s that sort of argument that constitutes little more than a punchline.
Honestly, if I were a juror and felt I needed a piece of information that was not presented in the evidence, I would probably look it up and just not tell anyone. I feel it is my duty as a juror to make the best, most educated decision I can based on the facts. If a pertinent fact is not presented, or is prevented from being presented for whatever reason, I would feel ethically bound to seek the facts in order to make the best decision. Otherwise, if I had a question that needed to be answered, and the judge would not allow it to be addressed (like the woman in the OP), and if I could not obtain the information on my own, then I would have no choice but to vote not guilty due to a lack of sufficient information. This would lead to deadlocked juries.
Then it *should *lead to deadlocked juries. You have no way of knowing why the information you want wasn’t presented. It was probably already deemed prejudicial or inadmissable for some other good reason. I’ve been on a jury where that happened, and we asked the prosecuting attorney afterward why that information wasn’t presented during the trial. She explained why, and while I wish she had included it, it was her call.
Yes, but.
A critical aspect of the jury’s role is which witness to believe when conflicting evidence is presented. A juror is not and can not be a tabula rasa who judges the plausibility of witnesses based solely on what was brought forth at trial. Every juror is automatically engaged in an amateur psychological evaluation of each witness, and brings a certain set of knowledge of how the world works. The plausibility of a witness will inescapably be judged against that.
So, let’s suppose I’m a juror and based on some particular expertise I have in some esoteric subject matter I know that a critical aspect of the prosecution’s case is bullshit. The information I’m aware of is obscure enough that even the best criminal defense team in the world wouldn’t have thought to bring it up. But it’s a completely airtight refutation of the central thesis of the prosecution’s theory. Aside from this bit of information, though, the prosecution has a hell of a case and the defense hasn’t raised any other reasonable doubt.
Should I vote to convict? I think that I cannot.
Do I share my knowledge? I believe I’m not supposed to, but to keep silent is to be party to a miscarriage of justice. I suppose I could ask to speak with the judge or something, but I have no idea what the result of that might be.
So, answer these questions however you like.
Now ask yourself, does it make any difference whether I acquired said esoteric knowledge before or after the beginning of the trial.
It’s like the old saying, “The problem isn’t what you don’t know. It’s what you think you know that isn’t so.”
Suppose you’re a juror at a murder trial. The victim was allegedly killed by some exotic poison. The lawyers for both sides present their evidence. The DA is arguing that the defendant poisoned the victim and the defense lawyer is arguing the victim died of natural causes.
But you decide to do some research on your own. During the course of the trial you learned the victim was Lithuanian. And through your research you discovered that one of the little known effects of the poison in question is that Lithuanians are totally immune to it. Feeling pleased with your efforts, you vote to acquit because you know the poison didn’t kill the victim.
However what you don’t know is that both of the lawyers are fully aware of the Lithuanian immunity. Furthermore, they also know something you don’t - that the victim was not biologically Lithuanian. He was a Latvian who was adopted and raised by a Lithuanian family but did not have the Lithuanian immunity which is genetically based. Being that both lawyers knew the defendant wasn’t immune, this issue wasn’t relevant to the case so neither the immunity or the adoption were entered as evidence.
But you managed to find out half of the evidence on your own without finding the equally important other half. And with only half of the evidence you formed a false conclusion.
You, as a juror, are not supposed to know if there is, in fact, information that was not presented in open court - How do you know that there is evidence out there to go looking for?
The rules of what evidence may or may not be presented to the jurors is already decided - right or wrong.
If you know that you have information (or even just opinion) that is prejudicail to one side or the other - you are supposed to let that be known during the seating process.
It’s enough that something doesn’t “add up.”
Theoretically there will always be “missing” information, in the sense that no person–juror, counsel, prosecutor, or judge–is ever going to completely understand a particular event or situation completely, inside and out.
Trials aren’t designed toward that end, because epistemologically that’s impossible. They’re designed to present a situation in a fair way.
A trial is NOT supposed to be a search for “the truth.” A trial is a process by which society decides how to handle a particular situation.