Miscellaneous

Just What We Thought All Along

By Anne Skove, Esq.

Do Facebook and friends pose a new set of pressing problems for jurors?

Like most things technological, these tools let people do what they would have been doing all along, if only they had the means. That's right: popping pies!

No, seriously. When we gripe about jurors' online gripes, it's because tweeting and facebooking creates an immediate and semi-permanent record of the thoughts they've had all along. Do people dislike jury service? Yes. Do they complain about it to friends and family? Yes. Always have, always will. The difference? Now it's online. This would be a difference without a distinction, except for the worldwideness of it all.

As for rule-writing, we advise vagueness. Don't rewrite rules to cover every new gadget that comes along. Remember when phones *didn't* take pictures? Courts rewrote all their rules to cover regular cell phones. Then the photophone arrived, and with it a whole new set of problems. Remember camera phones that *didn't* allow one to Google every blooming thing? More redrafting!

Court-o-rama says stop the madness! Unless you possess a phone that sees into the future, draft elastic rules, ones that apply to various personal technologies. "Avoid all news and discussion of the case" works better than "Thou shalt not tweet, post, comment, like, share, send, blog, write a Note, e-mail, IM, or tm."

Nevertheless, courts are reacting like parents of sexting teens. See How Can Courts Keep Jurors from Using Twitter, Google? Riley Yates and Kevin Amerman, Morning Call (March 30, 2009). Now if only we could keep Lindsay Lohan off Twitter, the world would be safe.

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).