Courts and connected jurors

Bruce Sterling points to the issues created by Google, Facebook and the other online tools allowing jurors to get external – and disallowed – information on the case they must examine:

Last week, a Maryland appeals court upended a first-degree murder conviction because a juror consulted Wikipedia for trial information. Earlier this year, the appeals judges erased a conviction for three counts of assault because a juror did cyberspace research and shared the findings with the rest of the jury. In a third recent trial, a juror’s admission to using his laptop for off-limits information jeopardized an attempted-murder trial.

On Friday, lawyers for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon asked for a new trial in part because five of the jurors who convicted her of embezzlement Dec. 1 were communicating among themselves on Facebook during the deliberations period – and at least one of them received an outsider’s online opinion of what the verdict should be. The “Facebook Friends,” as Dixon’s lawyers call them in court documents, became a clique that the lawyers argue altered jury dynamics.

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