Jury 2.0

54 Pages Posted: 1 Sep 2010 Last revised: 28 Oct 2012

See all articles by Caren Myers Morrison

Caren Myers Morrison

Georgia State University - College of Law

Date Written: February 25, 2011

Abstract

When the Framers drafted the Sixth Amendment and provided that the accused in a criminal case would have the right to a speedy and public trial by an “impartial jury,” it is unlikely that they imagined the members of that impartial jury becoming Facebook friends during deliberations, or Googling the defendant’s name during trial. But in the past few years, such cases have increasingly been making headlines. The impact of the Internet on the functioning of the jury has generated a lot of press, but has not yet attracted scholarly attention. This article seeks to focus legal discourse on this under-examined phenomenon.

While the media have characterized this issue as little more than a new variety of juror misconduct, that description may be unnecessarily reductive. This article argues that juror attempts to gain information about the defendant and about the law may not reflect misconduct so much as a misplaced sense of responsibility to render the “right” decision. These efforts might also be a signal from jurors that they are chafing under the restrictions of their role.

The modern conception of the jury as passive and uninformed replaced a more active body envisaged at common law and by the Framers. To earlier legal thinkers, impartiality meant a lack of familial or financial interest in the outcome of the case, not ignorance of the facts. This article argues that we need to rethink the jury’s role for the 21st century and restore some of the jury’s active engagement in the process of fact-finding. The jury that may ultimately emerge – Jury 2.0 – may share some characteristics with its more active forbears.

Keywords: Jury, Internet, Google, mistrial, juror misconduct, online research, blogging, criminal trial

Suggested Citation

Morrison, Caren Myers, Jury 2.0 (February 25, 2011). Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 62, p. 1579, 2011, Georgia State University College of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2010-15, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1669637

Caren Myers Morrison (Contact Author)

Georgia State University - College of Law ( email )

P.O. Box 4037
Atlanta, GA 30302-4037
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
623
Abstract Views
3,584
Rank
78,617
PlumX Metrics