Juror Misconduct Runs Rampant
Joaquim “El Chapo” Guzman’s February drug and conspiracy conviction is now being called into question after reports of jury misconduct surfaced. An anonymous juror reported that at least five of his fellow jurors read about the case in the media, in direct violation of the judge’s orders. The juror also kept notes from the trial and deliberation against the court’s instructions. The juror confessed that he himself also looked at media, such as Twitter, including specifically following the twitter accounts of journalists covering the trial. He admitted that the jury members were aware of potentially prejudicial material that the court had prevented them from seeing, although he contended that it didn’t play a role in their decision.
Technology has become increasingly problematic for jury trials in recent years. A 2010 article in the Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review mentions the advent of iPhones and Blackberrys as opening the door for this type of jury misconduct. Nearly a decade later, it is even easier for juries to commit misconduct. The juror in the El Chapo trial mentioned another juror looking up a news story on his smartwatch. Aside from the ability to do a google search, smartphones and watches alike have allowed for easy access to social media, where jurors are tempted to comment on their jury duty experience, often with inappropriate, case-specific information. After awarding a plaintiff several million dollars in damages, one juror wrote on Twitter, “nobody buy Stoam… they’ll probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12M lighter.”
The ease with which jurors can do outside research, and the likelihood that they will not be able to resist doing so, renders essential protective evidentiary rules ineffective. A defendant’s criminal history is a key example of this. Judges often exclude past criminal history as unduly prejudicial or for a number of other reasons, but if a juror does a google search of the defendant’s name, prior criminal history is sure to be one of the first things that pop up.
The google search also poses a problem when it comes to jurors’ curiosity about legal definitions. Earlier this month a North Dakota judge overturned a manslaughter conviction after a juror admitted to googling the definition of “reasonable doubt.” The definition she found differed from how the court had defined the legal standard.
Attempting to Prevent Juror Misconduct
Several Australian states have criminalized juror misconduct, and Britain has proposed similar legislation that would make juror misconduct a criminal offense subject to prison time. California has also attempted to crack down on internet-related juror misconduct by strengthening its contempt penalties and specifically including punishment for jurors who “electronically discuss confidential legal proceedings.”
Although the threat of prosecution would seemingly help to prevent juror misconduct, it is questionable whether that is truly the case. The juror in the El Chapo trial said that the jurors knew the judge was going to ask them if they had read news articles about a specific incident in El Chapo’s past that the judge had suppressed. According to the reporting juror, the jury thought they would be arrested or punished if they had read it, so they lied. These punitive measures may be doing more harm than good if they are only increasing juror’s motivation to be deceitful about what information to which they have and have not been exposed.
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