Social media is paving a two-way street when it comes to jury selections in the U.S. Social media use is making it both easier and harder to select a panel to hear a case in trial.
Easier: lawyers can look up potential jurors online, gleaning a great deal of personal information from social media accounts. Hobbies, likes, interests, political views, affiliations, religion, and so much more can all be learned or inferred about a person based on their social media postings. Harder: the more that a case and related pre-trial opinions are discussed online, the more likely potential jurors have already been influenced.
A local Alabama news station featured an article about an upcoming murder trial. During voir dire the attorneys were noticing a large number of potential jurors had already heard about the case.
Savannah Hardin’s death has caught national headlines. So locally, in Alabama, it’s hard to find people who haven’t yet heard any details or rumors. A lot of the social media attitude on the matter had rushed to judgement, deeming the defendant guilty – more than a year before the (probable) start date of the trial.
But the other side of that coin is offering a whole new world to trial lawyers across the country. During selection, learning as much as you can about the potential jurors is the goal Professional experts in selection mechanisms have made entire (lucrative) careers of the art of inference. Blunt and unique questions are asked to try and whittle down one’s personality in the shortest time possible. Prior experiences and existing opinions are sought out as a means of identifying who these potential jurors are.
“DecisionQuest, a trial consulting firm, started offering a social media monitoring service to lawyers three years ago… In the old days they could use private investigators. Last year a Michigan woman was removed from a criminal jury because she said on Facebook that the defendant was guilty—before arguments were finished,” (Business Week, 2011).
Lawyers.com features a how-to about using social media to suss out personal information during voir dire. The site encourages trial lawyers to hit Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like as hard as possible – to learn as much as they can about those before them.
I found this all really interesting. The connection between our current justice system and the Internet seems obvious, common-sense based – but I’ll openly admit it’s not something I think about regularly or have focused on much at all.
I like that social savvy lawyers can get an edge on learning who the potential jurors in front of them are. I like that jurors can be better understood, and potential biases revealed as early as possible.
With the constitutional right to a “trial by peers,” finding qualified, open-minded, fair individuals is paramount. Part of the process deems that the jury not have been exposed to facts or assumptions about the case pre-trial.
But then I think back to the issue in Alabama right now. The lawyers in that case have stated that it’s really hard to find people who don’t use social media at all; since the case is such a hot story in social chatter finding those not online is a priority.
I just don’t think someone not using social media could really be my “peer,” though – could they? And I know the sense of peer isn’t as literal as we tend to assume. As American citizens, we’re all peers. I just have this hunch that the current methods of keeping the jury pool away from scoops on the case will have to play catch up to the technology we have. Social media isn’t getting any smaller. It won’t be long before finding someone totally offline is very hard, let alone an entire jury of those someones.
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