Twittering jurors have been hitting the headlines lately. Mistrials and questions of justice interrupted have been on the minds of many commentators. This morning’s New York Times has an extensive article (featuring quotes from an interview with Dr. Doug Keene) on this issue and we predict there will be more to come as our justice system attempts to sort out the dilemma of our ties to the internet and the demands of justice.

There are few methods in place to keep jurors from accessing the internet from their telephones in the deliberation room. Few judges give specific instructions to jurors about refraining from doing their own internet research on the case. Jurors may end up thinking they are helping to make a just decision by doing research on their own—without understanding the complex rules that allow evidence in or keep evidence out.

How the judicial system will reconcile long-time rules and expectations with current technology and ease of access to information remains to be seen. Given the recent publicity, however, we expect to see much more emphasis on how to keep our system fair by educating jurors on the importance of basing decisions on evidence presented in the courtroom.

Update: July 25, 2009: And by the way, you can now follow us on Twitter by clicking here (but we won’t tweet from the courtroom): http://www.twitter.com/KeeneTrial.

Related posts:

1. It’s not just jurors who are doing it
2. Legal decisions that tick jurors off
3. The Viktor Bout “juror pledge” [“I will not do research on the internet”]
4. When the defendant texts the juror…