Good Intentions: Jury Misconduct With Outside Research

Juror misconduct can cover a wide range of behaviors that the judge has instructed the jurors not to engage in: this can be everything from discussing the case with one another before the final deliberations to calling the other jurors to discuss the case amidst a trial recess. In one particularly egregious case, a jury foreperson repeatedly texted her boyfriend, who sat in the gallery during the trial, notes about the trial that included derogatory remarks about the defense attorney and notice that the jury was going to return a conviction. In another, a juror exchanged 7,000 texts regarding the case with her family and friends during the course of the trial. In most of these cases, jurors deliberately circumvent the rules, often out of convenience and a lack of respect for the importance of their duties. Often, cases end in mistrials due to the bias or prejudice that the misconduct creates in the jurors.

In some cases, however, juror misconduct may come about not because of a lack of respect for the importance of a fair trial, but rather from a misguided attempt to create a fairer trial. In a case out of North Dakota, for instance, a juror printed out the definition of “reasonable doubt” during a recess and shared it with the other jurors. In that case, the judge threw out the verdict over the conduct. Just earlier this week, a judge narrowly decided against a mistrial after one juror had apparently looked up the word “access” first in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary and then directly in the Ohio Revised Code. In both of these cases, it isn’t so clear that the jurors were deliberately circumventing the rules or exhibiting an intentional disrespect for the importance of the process. These attempts, however misguided, seem to have been genuine attempts to understand the entangled mess that comes with questions that intertwine law and facts.

 In the question over the word “access”, the judge reminded the jury to ask the judge any questions rather than look them up, but followed up this statement by telling the jury that they could not ask for outside material and that the only definition of words not defined before deliberations should come from their own normal understanding of the word. While this rule is clearly intended to focus the jury on the actual issues presented at trial, it isn’t hard to see how a jury could stumble on a question that might very well turn on an issue of the definition of a word. For the jurors who must make sense of the arguments presented by the attorneys, poorly defined words may mean that not only can the jury not reach a consensus but that individual jurors feel that they cannot give a reasoned answer to the factual questions they are asked to resolve. In the case of the word access, for instance, a review of the same source that the jurors initially consulted reveals the very confusion over the word—the word “access” has a great range of definitions that often conflict with one another.

While, of course, misguided misconduct does not make the conduct right, perhaps the actions of these jurors suggest that something is lacking in the process. If judges are unavailable or unwilling to answer the questions of the jury, we risk not only encouraging jurors to take matters to Google but encouraging jurors to check out of the whole process. Perhaps judges need to take the time to explain how much and whether or not the law is ambiguous both to help the jury focus in on the purely factual questions and the discourage juries from looking up definitions (such as “access” or “reasonable doubt”) and accessing, in the process, information that should not factor into their deliberations.