Attorney's are using Google and social media websites to determine if people will make good jurors.
When picking a jury, lawyers always try to stack the panel with people likely to take their side. Now, some are taking the vetting process to a new level: they're quietly trawling social networks and other sites to ferret out the most intimate details of potential jurors' lives, from their sexual orientation to their income level and politics.
In essence, the traditional question-and-answer session known as "voir dire" is being transformed into "voir Google," sparking concerns about privacy and about whether courts are adequately supervising the process.
While interviews suggest that Internet vetting of jurors is catching on in courtrooms across the nation, lawyers are skittish about discussing the practice, in part because court rules on the subject are murky or nonexistent in most jurisdictions. Ten law firms and five jury consultants declined requests from Reuters Legal to observe them building juror profiles, many saying they weren't sure judges would approve. "Lawyers don't know the rules yet," said John Nadolenco, a partner at Mayer Brown in Los Angeles. "It's like the Wild West."
One law firm that was open about its online vetting of jurors is the Wooten Law Firm in Auburn, Alabama. Earlier this month, plaintiffs' lawyer Nick Wooten allowed Reuters Legal to watch as he and his team combed through a roster of 280 citizens who comprise the jury pool for two of Wooten's upcoming cases in Circuit Court in rural Chambers County. One client is suing an insurance company that allegedly declined to replace a roof damaged in a storm; the other is suing a gas company over a gas log heating system that allegedly sparked a fire.
After the jury list was culled by eliminating former Wooten clients and others who would be knocked out of the pool anyway, a paralegal began assembling profiles based on each would-be juror's online persona. The paralegal scanned Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and used Google searches to find jurors' names on the websites of government agencies, school boards, local companies, and sites that contain property records. Links to each site were assembled in a spreadsheet.
The online review quickly produced useful insights for Wooten to take to voir dire. For example, the Facebook page of Juror 115 contained, in Wooten's estimation, both positive indicators and red flags. Wooten was pleased to discover that the 32-year-old white male is Facebook friends with three people from Wooten's high school class and with one of his clients. Also, the juror "likes" the Chambers County Sheriff's Department; one of Wooten's grandfathers was a police officer in the area. "We have a lot in common," Wooten said.
In Columbia, Missouri, criminal-defense attorney Jennifer Bukowsky builds Excel spreadsheets about prospective jurors using Facebook, MySpace, Google Inc and a state database of civil and criminal actions called Case.net. During a trial in Circuit Court for Boone County, Missouri, late last year in which her client, a black male, was charged with sexual assault, Bukowsky hoped to keep a white female juror on the panel because the woman's Facebook page included several pictures of her with a black man -- which Bukowsky took as a sign the woman was not racist. "Internet research affected our decision with respect to whether to keep or strike a juror," Bukowsky said. The prosecution struck the woman from the jury pool, and the trial ended in a hung jury.
Link:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/17/us-courts-voirdire-idUSTRE71G4VW20110217?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews