Ordinarily I wouldn’t publish a link to a New York Times article because doing so puts The Monkey Cage in the position of a very small dog wagging a very large tail. But this piece is just so darned interesting, points to such a potentially serious problem, and ties in so directly with Melissa’s post yesterday that I couldn’t resist.
Judges could simply order BlackBerrys, iPhones, and even plain old cellphones to be confiscated while a trial is in session. But many trials go on for months, and we’ve all gotten so dependent on these devices that jurors simply wouldn’t stand for having them taken away—and judges wouldn’t dare impose such restrictions in any event. Less drastically, judges could broaden their current instructions to jurors not to discuss a case or to consider any information not presented in the trial itself. However, relying on juror self-restraint strikes me as extremely unlikely to resolve this problem. If the tendency of jurors to go Googling for trial-relatated information is anywhere near as widespread as the Times piece suggests, then some serious rethinking is going to be required about what constitutes a fair hearing by an unbiased jury that decides on the basis of information presented at trial.
Do this strike you, as it does me, as a real problem? And what possible solutions come to mind that I’m missing?
UPDATE: Melissa just now posted on this very same Times article. Great minds and all that…
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