Personal Injury- Can Juries be Impartial?
Can Juries Be Impartial?
In our modern age of techno gizmos and internet mass accessibility, can juries remain impartial? If you have ever served on a jury, you know that before the proceedings begin, the judge instructs the jurors prohibiting them from conducting any outside research while they serve on the panel. Juries are also prohibited from divulging any substantive information concerning the progress of its deliberations. The reason behind this prohibition is to let the legal system follow its course; to let the advocates convince the juries, and not to have the juries influenced by prejudice, or other preconceived notions that could adversely affect the outcome of the trial.
Despite the judge’s warnings, there is an implicit understanding that juries are not completely impartial, and that life experiences cannot be neutralized regardless of what we hear in the courtroom. In order to minimize these effects, the legal system provides for voir dire, the process by which prospective jurors are questioned about their backgrounds and potential biases before being chosen to sit on a jury. For instance, if during the voir dire process, the defendant’s attorney in a personal injury case discovers that a juror has recently lost a close family member in a car accident, it is likely that that juror will not be selected to serve on the jury, because he is expected to have a strong bias against the defendant.
Suppose the juror has no preconceived notions about either the claim or the parties to the case, yet once he or she leaves the courtroom at the end of each day, the juror is surrounded by people or the media offering opinions and information on the matter that is being adjudicated. Once the juror leaves the courthouse, he is not supposed to communicate with others about the case, nor acquire or attempt to find any extraneous information. But, with free access to internet sources such as Google,Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, many jurors cannot withstand the temptation to dig deeper, to get more information, or to share the experience with their friends. Some jurors post updates on cases while the cases are still ongoing. As recently as last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, despite the judge’s instructions. After 8 weeks of trial, the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial, because it turned out that many of the other jurors were doing the same thing.
Jurors are not supposed to see the evidence that was excluded by the judge or have access to prejudicial information, but what’s to stop them from doing so. Although judges have long since revised their jury instructions to include warnings about using internet sources, some jurors just don’t follow them.
Jurors have always been on their honor not to look up the facts of the case. The difference now is that, with Facebook and Twitter, it’s easier to find out when a juror has broken the rule. Cell phones and BlackBerrys are here to stay so we need to develop new mechanisms to ensure that jurors do not access them, before justice is decided by the vote of “twitterers”.
To learn more about personal injury law please read our personal injury law page. To learn more about our personal injury trial lawyer, please read about Jason Fernandez, or watch Jason's personal injury video, or contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free case review.
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