Judges fear social media is jeopardizing fair trials.

Report from jury duty: defendant looks like a murderer. GUILTY. Waiting for opening remarks.

That tweet from comedian Steve Martin, followed by a string of other “jury duty” tweets, was met with laughter by some and alarm by others. Was he really tweeting from the jury box?

He wasn’t; he was just joking. But judges aren’t amused in the least if real jurors take to Twitter. Or to Facebook, Google or other social media or search engines.

A Franklin County jury was deliberating a murder case last week when a juror announced that she had looked up the definition of a legal term on her tablet computer. Before she could read it aloud, other jurors told her she had violated the judge’s order not to do outside research. Less than two hours later, Common Pleas Judge Tim Horton had removed the woman from the jury.

It was the second time in 15 months that a Franklin County judge had dismissed a juror for using an electronic device to research a case.

“We’re all very concerned. These are just the times it gets reported. What about the ones who are doing it and not telling anyone?” said Charles Schneider, the administrative judge for Common Pleas Court.

Judges in federal, state and municipal courts always have warned jurors not to investigate a case on their own. But the instant access that cellphones and personal computers provide to the Internet makes it easier than ever for jurors to violate those instructions and imperil a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.

In a national survey last year, 6 percent of federal district judges said one or more jurors in their cases had used social media to communicate during a trial or deliberations.

To combat that, nearly 30 percent of judges confiscated phones and other electronic devices during jury deliberations, and 22 percent did so at the start of each day of trial, the survey found. The majority only warned jurors verbally not to use social media.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/09/10/judges-fear-social-media-jeopardizing-fair-trials.html