Without a net: Judges tell jurors with smart phones, "No surfing allowed"
Dennis Baron
debaron at illinois.edu
Wed Mar 18 21:34:12 UTC 2009
There's a new post on the Web of Language:
Without a net: Judges tell jurors with smart phones, "No surfing
allowed"
According to the New York Times, jurors around the country have been
triggering mistrials by using their iPhones to research the cases
they’re deciding, or worse yet, by Twittering trial updates. Judges
traditionally instruct jurors not to read about or discuss the case
outside the courtroom. Now they’ve added prohibitions against surfing
or talking about the case online as well, because more and more are
googling plaintiffs and defendants and the finer points of the law on
their web-enable cell phones, or posting trial trivia on Facebook.
It won't be long before Law and Order runs an episode on this new kind
of jury tampering – L and O'sunaccredited but fully-functional Hudson
University School of Law has already worked getting juries offline
into its curriculum – but real-life attorneys fear that web-savvy
jurors are undermining the criminal justice system and they want the
internet out of court.
find out if this is a good idea...
read the rest of the post on the Web of Language: http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321
http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron
read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20090318/2b5e69fb/attachment.htm>
More information about the Lgpolicy-list
mailing list