Ohio

Lawyers Are FaceBooking Potential Jurors for Biases

By Cleveland Law Library

An article in the Wall Street Journal indicates that lawyers are using the technology available through facebook to check for juror biases and possible dispositions on legal issues. Sometimes this leads to kicking off a juror, but it is clearly not fullproof.  The article relates a criminal case where defense cousel tried to facebook a jury, but the client was still convicted and sentenced to death. Although the article suggests that traditional voir dire questions elicit more valuable information, judges may not be able to prohibit lawyers from bringing a laptop to class and checking out the potential jurors during the process. The article concludes by suggesting that the possibilities are endless for finding information on people through other sites such as blogs.

Full post as published by Cleveland Law Library Weblog on February 25, 2011 (boomark / email).