Tag: JURY

A Pennsylvania woman could soon face criminal charges for conducting online research while serving as a juror in a murder trial. The woman, Gretchen Black, reportedly consulted the Web to find out more about the injuries the victim had suffered, and offered to share her findings with the rest of the jury. At the time, the jury had already determined that the defendant was not guilty of ...

It's no secret that potential employers will check an applicant's Facebook profile when considering them for a position. Now the District Attorney's office in Cameron County, Texas will be turning to the social networking site when screening potential jurors. D.A. Armando R. Villalobos told the Brownsville Herald that recent upgrades to the county's courtrooms will allow prosecutors to check ...

Facebook and Twitter have created plenty of courtroom headaches for jurors and judges, but new research from Reuters Legal shows just how many trials have been derailed by the Internet -- and, more importantly, just how many jurors continue to defy legal protocol online. The report shows that, since 1999, Web-related juror misconduct has led to at least 90 challenged verdicts -- more than half ...

Bruce Slutsky, a 61-year-old from Flushing, NY was recently called to jury duty to hear a civil case, which involved a plaintiff filing assault charges against his neighbors. Unlike most jurors, however, Slutsky decided to document his courtroom experience on his blog. And, although the Queens, NY court ultimately determined that Slutsky's online actions didn't pose a threat to the trial's ...

A man convicted of manslaughter will get another chance to plead his case before a jury of his peers, now that a Florida Court of Appeals has overturned his conviction because of an iPhone. In 2006, 62-year-old Jose Tapanes was charged with fatally shooting his 19-year-old neighbor Christopher Cote after Cote had walked his dog on Tapanes's lawn. During the ensuing manslaughter trial, Tapanes's ...

The idyllic burg of Blogtown would get mighty lonely and boring without the asinine behavior of oblivious social networkers. Snarky nerds now depend on those daily stories of arrests, divorces, firings and expulsions, so -- thankfully -- a kind Michigan resident has stepped up to the plate of social networking stupidity. Hadley Jons, an enthusiastic juror serving in a resisting arrest trial, ...

So, we don't even know where to start with this one. It seems as though jurors serving on active court cases are tweeting details about the trials. Really? Yes. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which frames policy for federal courts, issued an updated set of model jury instructions late last month to explicitly prohibit sharing and researching trial information through the ...