Deliberations

Ever Wonder What This Blog Sounds Like?

Wonder no more, because today's post is audio.  I was delighted to be invited back to "Lake Effect," the daily interview-and-arts program on Milwaukee's public radio station WUWM.  The interview is here; it's about blogging jurors, and the conversation pulls together several points and themes from prior posts on this site. 

If you have time, listen to the other guests too.  They include the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel's Tannette Johnson-Elie, who writes wonderfully about the strengths and challenges of Milwaukee's minority-owned business community; authors Alice Sebold and CJ Hribal; and the research director for the Milwaukee Public Policy Forum, which is reporting on problems faced by smaller school districts here. 

What's a "lake effect," you ask, since you're not all from around here?  It's when spring takes forever -- I mean forever -- to arrive in the towns and neighborhoods along Lake Michigan's shoreline.  "Cooler near the lake," the weather folks say day after day.  It will drive you crazy, but the fall almost makes up for it, since winter comes a little later to the shoreline too.

(Photo by de jäck Mamsäll at http://www.flickr.com/photos/75471113@N00/160080677/; license details there.)

The Future Of Polling?

Can you do a good opinion survey for free?  No, it turns out, but it's interesting to look at a site that's taking baby steps in that direction.  If you stand on that spot and squint, you can see what the future might look like.

"In minutes instead of days"

Ask500People.com explains itself this way:

In 2004 James Surowiecki wrote a best-selling book called "The Wisdom of Crowds."  The book's premise is that diverse, decentralized people voting independently are better at predicting future events or trends than individuals, small groups or even domain experts.

There are tools for surveying groups of independent voters, but they're either slow, expensive or both. We built Ask500People to gather input and opinion data in minutes instead of days, and to create a platform that other applications can integrate.

It doesn't substitute for a true poll -- at least not at the free level that I was exploring, and probably not at the "premium" level they offer.  At the free level, you get to ask 100 people, not 500.  The site puts your question on a network of websites, although it doesn't tell you which ones:

When a question goes live on the network, over 75,000 websites display that poll. This network reach allows us to deliver voting results in real-time.

Would you fire your boss?

I tried it with a question Gallup asked in September:  "If you could fire your current boss, would you do so or not?"  In Gallup's results, 24% of people said yes and 76% said no, although the numbers shifted for "disengaged" workers:

Just 6% of engaged workers say they would fire their boss if they had the chance, while 51% of actively disengaged associates would get rid of their leader if they could.

The 100 people who saw my question on Ask500People.com's websites must have been disengaged.  The question took around five hours to float to the top of the pile and only a few minutes more to collect 100 answers:  46 people would fire their boss and 54 wouldn't.  More than half the answers were from the U.S., and the rest were from people all over the world:  someone in Parow, South Africa, who would keep the boss, one in Makati, Phillipines, who was in dismissal mode, and so on.

Regular or premium?

In the premium version, you can get up to 500 answers, at $150 for worldwide responses and $225 for responses limited to one country.  You're not limited to yes or no questions; you can choose multiple choice or a sliding scale.  And when you pay for premium, Ask500People.com promises to keep you anonymous. 

It will never be Gallup, though, mostly because the respondents are all people who are sitting in front of a computer when your question happens by.  That's a lot of people, but it's not a cross-section.  If you want to know what logo your new dot-com company should use, you might want to ask this group; if you want to know what your jury pool thinks, you'll never get more than a partial answer. 

Does God exist?

Take it less seriously, though, and the site becomes fascinating, for the questions people ask as well as the answers they give.  Samples from the other night:

Are you a racist?  83% no, 17% yes

Do you know where Morocco is?  76% yes, 24% no

Does God exist?  72% yes, 28% no

Some of the questions give a sense of the demographics of the group:

What is your age?  24% under 18, 27% between 18 and 30, 30% between 30 and 40, 19% over 50 (it looks like 40-50 wasn't offered as a choice)

Are you a democrat or republican?  33% Republican, 67% Democrat

The future?

What's even more fascinating is to picture this technology in ten years, or four, or one.  Wikipedia's current article on Facebook says that social network has 49 million users, with 4 million new people arriving every month.  Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal report that older people are joining Facebook in droves, to the dismay of some of the college students who used to have it to themselves.  Meanwhile developers are testing all kinds of ways to link and communicate among different social networks on the Web.

So surely we're heading for a level of demographic diversity in large social networks that would come closer to that of a jury pool.  And we now know it's possible to float a survey question to a network, privately, and get answers quickly.  As the Internet evolves and takes us with it, it will be interesting to see whether polling changes, and how.

Jurors And Social Networking? So What?

"So what?"

I got that question from a member of the audience at the Wisconsin State Public Defender Conference last month.  Just what any speaker wants to hear.

But it was a good question.  I was talking about jurors' secrets, and stressing that no matter how good your voir dire is, potential jurors are unlikely to tell you about the experiences that most powerfully shaped them.  "So what?" this guy asked.  "Since I don't know these secrets, I can't do anything to respond to them.  Why are you telling me this?"

When we got to the topic of social networking and the ocean of information about jurors on the Internet, there were more questions on the same theme.  How am I supposed to use this?  More often than not, a juror who's writing on the Internet is writing anonymously -- and even if she uses her name, there will be sixty people with the same name writing other blogs, or posting weird messages on MySpace.  I'll never find my juror.  Why bother knowing all this?

Three reasons to know about social networking in voir dire

It's true there's no point in trying to find potential jurors in the vast expanse of the Internet.  But you still need to know about social networking when you stand up for voir dire.  Here's what to do with your new knowledge:

1.  Ask jurors.  You may not be able to find jurors' writing on your own, but you can ask them.  Do you blog?  Is your creative product, even so much as a Tweet or a photo, out there on the Internet in any way where someone without your password could see it?  How would I find that? 

Let them know you're not trying to pry (you don't need to see their passworded wish list at Amazon.com, much as you might like to), but you owe it to your client to fully understand what they've put out there for public view.

2.  Warn jurors.  Judges routinely warn jurors not to read or listen to radio, newspaper, or television reports about the trial, and not to talk to friends, family, or co-workers about it.  These warnings, especially when delivered in the usual monotone, may not be enough to jar jurors out of their Internet habits. 

Many jurors get their news and blog feeds, and a stream of news stories their friends have posted, delivered continuously to their computer screens.  Likewise many jurors head for their computers in the evening to blog or post about their day.  Alone in that room, typing may not feel like "talking about the case," even though it is.  When you know a little about social networking, you have the vocabulary to be sure tech-savvy jurors will follow the "don't read, don't tell" instruction.

3.  Just know.  Jury selection is about intuition, and the broader and deeper your knowledge about people is, the stronger your intuition will be.  You already know that the things you learned in your third-shift factory job in college, or the summer you spent clearing dishes at a country club, guide your voir dire decisions more reliably than anything you learned in law school or in this blog.  Think of social networking like that.  "EVERYBODY UNDER THIRTY IS ON THE INTERNET," Erin the blogging juror tells us.  If you want to talk to those jurors, you'd better have some sense of that world.

So what about secrets?

What about secrets, to come back to my questioner?  How does it help to know there are things you don't know?  It helps because the most ineffective speaker in the world is the one who assumes she has her audience all figured out. 

We all think we're humble, but we're not, or at least not always.  At some point each of us is like that smiling guy at the party, the one who has no idea the reason his joke fell flat is that your sister is gay, or your boyfriend is black, or your father is blind. 

When we remember how much we don't know, we speak with respect and restraint.  Without those qualities, we'll never persuade anybody.

(Photo by Paolo Mazzo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/paolomazzoleni/436307747/; license details there.)

A Trial Lawyer's Guide To Social Networking Sites, Part IV

It's done!  No, that's not true; it will never be done.  But here is the last installment of Deliberations' guide to the world of social networking, for your use in talking to potential jurors.  The entire guide is now a separate page on this site, filed under "Voir Dire Resources" in the side bar. 

It's a certainty that I've missed categories here, and and that new ones will pop up from the second I hit "save."  Please let me know if you see things that need to be corrected, updated, or augmented here, and I'll try to keep the page as current as I can.

Here's the last of the list:

Contests

The Internet has always teemed with contest sites, but often now the contest planners, contestants, audience, and judges are all site users.  Examples:

• Bix, "Create.  Enter.  Judge."  Typical contests are for cutest dog, best president of all time, and karaoke, karaoke, karaoke.
• Gather, listed above as a basic social network, has regular writing competitions.  October 2007 brought the announcement of the five finalists in the First Chapters Romance Writing Competition.

Comments

You can have a significant Internet presence without ever having a blog, social network page, or photostream of your own.  On thousands of sites, from large mainstream newspapers to major political blogs to individual photos on Flickr, readers can post comments, and many do.  When jurors write on line to defend their verdicts, they often do it in the comments to a news story about the trial; on this blog we've discussed examples here, here, and here.  To get a sense of how commenters get into conversations and develop recognizable personalities in comment threads, go to any major blog.  The WSJ Law Blog  and Firedoglake are two examples of blogs with heavy comment traffic and repeat commenters who get to know each other.

Forums

A forum is a discussion board, a little like comments without the underlying news story.  A user starts a discussion, usually by asking a question, and others respond.  Some forums are user-generated issue forums, offering a place for people to talk about particular challenges.  It would be hard to think of an issue there's no forum for:  pregnancy, parenting, cancer, weight loss, pick a problem and search it with the word "forum" and you'll find one. 

Other forums are associated with a particular business or author, most likely one who promotes a long-term approach that followers might need help with.  Thus Weight Watchers members support each other in on-line forums, and followers of David Allen's Getting Things Done books ask each other questions in forums on his site.   

As with comments, forums draw repeat participants whose personalities become defined.  At any given time, a given forum might have a few wise sages revered by all, some enthusiastic idea-offerers who pipe up often, a handful of new arrivals full of questions, and a rabblerouser who likes to challenge everything.

Groups

Most social networking sites allow users to gather into groups, but there are also "group" sites where the group is the main event.  Group sites offer a page where group members can see a shared calendar, posted files, and links, and they also offer a single group E-mail address that sends mail to all group members.  Groups can be as small as an extended family sharing baby pictures, or as large as FlyLady's group, whose 440,000 members (as of October 2007) get lots of daily reminder E-mails to help them stay organized and not overwhelmed.  (FlyLady's associated web site is here.  You'll either love her or want to flee.)  Examples of group hosting sites:

• Yahoo! Groups
• Google Groups
• WebRing

A variation on a group site is a wiki, where users collaborate to build web pages.   Big public wikis like Wikipedia are well known, but any work group, family reunion committee, or school club can have a wiki hosted at sites like

• pbwiki, "simple and secure collaboration"
• Wikispaces, "wikis for everyone"
• editme, "Edit your web"

Getting personal

The further you go down the social networking road, the more you find yourself in places where users might not want to be recognized.  Dating sites are the biggest example.  Consumers spent $500 million on Internet dating in 2005, about a quarter of the $2 billion spent on all Internet content (as opposed to, for example, on-line catalog sales) that year.  (Figures are from the Online Publishers Association.)  The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported in 2006 that one in ten Internet users had visited an on-line dating site, 43% of those visitors had dated someone they met there, and 31% of American adults know someone who has visited a dating site.  With numbers like that, it's likely that someone in the jury box knows a little or a lot about sites like:

• Match.com, "It's okay to look."
• eHarmony.com, "matches you based on compatibility in the most important areas of life"
• Chemistry, whose ads target those who were "rejected by eHarmony"

On the other hand, the technology behind dating sites is also used for things you could tell your grandmother about -- like Essembly, "a fiercely non-partisan social network that allows politically interested individuals to connect with one another."

Likewise, there are many ways that jurors might use the Internet that they'd want to keep private, even though they're fully legitimate.  People store their tax information on Turbotax, and look for jobs at Monster.com.  They can track their progress toward personal goals at Joe's Goals, and check their mental health on the various tests at Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness site.  They post lists of things they'd love to own, not only at scores of store sites like Amazon, but also at free-standing "wish list" sites" like TheThingsIWant.com and DreamofThis.com.  They do all this on the promise that their personal information won't be revealed.  Rule of thumb:  if you couldn't see a juror's Internet profile without that juror's own password, don't ask about it in voir dire.

That way monsters lie

And then there's beyond.  The American Gaming Association says almost 23 million people gambled on the Internet in 2005.  Oddly, I'm not finding statistics that look trustworthy to describe how much pornography is out there, but anybody with a spam filter knows it's a lot.  There are hate sites for every group you could possibly hate.  Lawyers who work in these areas have to learn this territory.  I have not had to, and hope not to.

Combine all ingredients and stir well

Got all that?  Great.  Now, to finish the list, think of as many ways to combine all these applications as you possibly can.  There's an application that lets you see your Facebook friends' Second Life avatars on their Facebook profiles, and "teleport" from there to wherever they are in Second Life.  Facebook applications like HobNob! let you request introductions to other people in the same way LinkedIn does.  "Profile aggregators" like MyLifeBrand are emerging to let users manage all their different social networks.  Mashable is the news source for all this; subscribe to their blog and watch the world turn a lot faster than you thought it did.

Just plain web sites

Finally, don't forget web sites.  Your juror might have a plain ordinary old-fashioned web site.  You'd hate to forget to ask about that.

(Image by Leigh Blackall at http://www.flickr.com/photos/leighblackall/64955397/; license details there.)

A Message From Erin

I had the honor of speaking today at the Wisconsin Public Defender Conference, which continues tomorrow. One topic we touched on was jurors writing on line. It was timely, since Florida lawyer Robert Kelley had just written about Erin the blogging juror, whose September 28 post was titled "i will eat your babies, bitch!" and whose next post on October 3 was titled "I AM A JUROR."

Kelley's post didn't criticize Erin, but she didn't like it, or the attention her blog got from it. So she wrote another post on Tuesday. It's worth reading. Notice whether her language makes you uncomfortable, and whether you see intelligence under that. See if her questions resonate with you. Do you agree when she says that if we start striking every juror with an Internet presence, we'll be left entirely without young jurors? Here it is:

dear members of the florida bar: welcome to my shitty blog

jury duty. i actually did have it that was one of the things i wrote on this blog of lies that was actually true. anyway according to the florida bar i am what is wrong with juries today or something. and i guess the solution to the problem that is me is to select out jurors who have blogs or myspace or facebook or whatever. okay i didn't write my thesis on psychometrics or anything (yes i did) but i bet if you dismissed every potential juror with some type of internet presence you would end up with range restriction galore. EVERYBODY UNDER THIRTY IS ON THE INTERNET. those are my peers. please don't shatter my dreams of commiting a horrible crime and being judged by a jury of my peers. not that the people on the jury i served on were actually my peers. THERE WAS A WOMAN ON THE JURY WHO COULD NOT READ. i don't think i've ever met anybody who couldn't read in my entire life. thank god the constitution doesn't actually guarantee a defendant that his case will be heard by a jury of his peers because that would be a huge lie. i think what it guarantees is an impartial jury which is also a huge lie. i didn't actually serve on a capital punishment case, that was a joke. i wouldn't even be allowed to serve on a capital punishment case because i don't necessarily agree with the death penalty. i've never done a study on death qualified juries but i'm pretty sure the american psychological association did and determined that they are more likely to convict in general. THAT IS LIKE THE OPPOSITE OF IMPARTIAL. i don't believe our legislative system is breaching our constitutional rights and a bunch of lawyers in florida are freaking out because i mentioned on my stupid blog that nobody reads that i was selected to serve on a jury and i didn't even divulge any information about the case. i mean jesus bob kelly, weren't your friends in florida executing retards until like a year ago? and you don't like me because i say "fuck" alot? this is truly a dumb ass world we are living in.

A juror's blog tells you things about the juror that she probably won't tell you herself; but the fact that there is a blog doesn't make your strike decision for you. Robert Kelley is right that you'd hate to leave Erin on your jury without having seen her writing. And Erin is right that lawyers shouldn't reject blogging jurors out of hand, even those whose writing is as lavishly angry as hers is. You'd strike her in many trials, yes. But in the right trial, she might be the juror you need.

(Photo by Wesley Fryer at http://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/503600331/; license details there.)

Lawyers In Etanis Cumba Trial, You Have A Juror On Line One

Soon this will be commonplace, but in October 2007 it's still news. After a jury acquitted the defendant in an intensely charged murder trial last week, one of the jurors posted a comment on line to defend the verdict.

"He killed my baby"

Joseph Wilson, 20 years old and two years out of high school, was stabbed to death at a 2005 party. The killer wore a bandana over his face. The state charged a 19-year-old, Etanis Cumba, and last week a jury acquitted him. The scene was awful; at least one juror was crying, while Wilson's mother screamed, "He killed my baby!"

A Boston blog called Universal Hub, "an alternate news and information resource for the Boston area," posted a short notice of the verdict -- and the comments started flowing in. "[W]hen the NOT GUILTY verdict was handed down, and the victims family's cries and moans for their lost son," said the first one,

all the defendent ETANIS CUMBA did, was turn around, laugh, and snicker at the pain the Wilson family was enduring to see their son's murderer set free once again. As Boston's crime rate, especially homicide/murder continues to sky-rocket, these rats whom are the lowest form of life on this planet, continue to be set free.

Some commenters simply chimed in on guilt or innocence (as in "HE will get his one day what goes around comes around... god will punish him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"), but others added details. "Cumba, whom has a very violent wrap-sheet was 17 at the time of the murder," said a comment, probably the same person as the first one. And there was jury intimidation, added that person and others, citing a report from Wilson's mother that "10 or 20 of Cumba's friends" had menacingly surrounded a juror in the parking lot. Meanwhile another commenter defended the presumption of innocence: "What next, a righteous lynch mob? Puhleeze."

"We did the best we could"

Into this fray came another comment -- from someone who, like most of the others, used the name "Anonymous." This is what it said:

The state created a strong probability that he was guilty, but not beyond reasonable doubt.

1) Cumba's past was not revealed to us at any time. We were not allowed to do outside research. All we knew was that this kid got arrested for mary j, and was suspected of this crime.

2) Witness One was a person who could've well committed the crime, and whose testimony of the events contradicted those of the party goers.

3) Witness Two was high on crack, weed and had drunk alcohol the night of the crime. His story also contradicts that of the party goers. He did not actual witness the crime happening.

4) Nate Yarde and his intimidation was not mentioned at any time during this trial

5) The letters, the whole 3 we were shown, had multiple interpretations. We read them MULTIPLE times, and had the same conclusions that they ambiguous. They could be a scared kid, or story coordination.

6) To us, the phone calls indicated he had drugs. Why would his brother get everything out of his room and LEAVE KNIVES BEHIND? And, where was this BLOOD OF OTHER PEOPLE ON THESE KNIVES? THIS WAS NOT ADMITTED INTO EVIDENCE.

The BURDEN OF PROOF lies on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There was NO physical evidence. There was NO admittance of his past, or prior incidents.

All we had to work with is a kid, who we DID NOT SEE LAUGHING ONCE, who was accused of a crime. Their evidence against him was the word of two individuals with dubious credibility, and some letters and PIECES of phone calls. I don't know where you got all of your "evidence" but these were things that we weren't told. We were picked BECAUSE we were ignorant of the case so that we could judge him SOLELY for the charges at hand.

We did the best we could, with the information we were given.

If this kid is who you say he is, he will probably end up dead by 25.

And given what I know about my co-jurors... Jury intimidation... I would have to say that most definitely did not happened. What happened was a shakey case that possibly let another murder go free.

It was -- or was supposed to be, and sure sounds like -- one of the jurors themselves. In a sense it's not different from a juror talking to a newspaper reporter. But in its emotional immediacy, its availability, and its detail, it is different.

The information superhighway ahead

It's the second time in the last month that I've learned of a juror defending a controversial verdict in the comments to someone else's blog. Meanwhile CourtTV was offering live chat with some of Phil Spector's jurors for the trial-hungry commenters who hang out over there.

It's all happening as we watch. Already we have jurors texting each other their Internet research, juror blogs, jurors reading blogs, jurors commenting on blogs, verdicts challenged over all these things. Few predictions are safe, but this one is: it will happen more and more, faster and faster. Jurors are on line.

________________

Update: see the October 5 comment to this blog here, pointing out another juror comment today to defend another verdict here. The juror comment came after Peoria's PJStar.com reported the sentencing of two men convicted of gang rape. Other comments to that story "were getting very racist," says my commenter, "and this juror stepped in to say the jury never considered race in the deliberations."

(Photo by dro!d at http://flickr.com/photos/lecates/454787692/; license details there.)

If You Could Have Only One News Source . . .

At least half the challenge in learning about juries is replacing your stereotypes, projections, and assumptions about people with real awareness. If I had to face that challenge with just one news source, it might be the Gallup Poll.

Actually it's a handful of news sources, because Gallup has different feed "channels" in which they report research results on different topics. I subscribe to all of them: business and economy, government and politics, health and healthcare, religion and social trends, and education and youth. They send me a handful of reports a week, most of which are eye-opening in some way.

Here are a few recent stories from Gallup that challenged what I thought I knew, or highlighted something I hadn't thought about:

• "Public Not That Worried About Mortgage Crisis Affecting Own Finances": "Americans appear to be far more apprehensive about the impact of the subprime mortgage crisis on the national economy than on their own financial situations."
• "The Divide Between Public School Parents and Private School Parents": "Parents with children who attend private, parochial, or who are home schooled are much more positive than parents with children in public school about the quality of education their children receive, and are less likely to report concerns for their children's physical safety."
• "Americans Put Obesity On Par With Smoking in Terms of Harmful Effects": "More than one-quarter of Americans report that obesity has been a cause of serious health problems in their family. Americans are more than three times as likely to say they are sympathetic to those who are significantly overweight as to say they are unsympathetic."
• "Most Americans Approve of Interracial Marriages": "The vast majority of whites and an even larger majority of blacks approve of interracial marriages. Older Americans -- regardless of race or ethnicity -- are less inclined to support interracial marriages than are younger Americans, but still, older Americans show majority support."
• "Sixty Percent of Americans Approve of Labor Unions": "60% of Americans say they approve of labor unions, while 32% disapprove. The public's approval rating of labor unions has not shown much significant change in the past four years." But more people approve than belong: "Only about 1 in 10 Americans say they personally belong to a labor union."

(Photo by Kate Mereand at http://www.flickr.com/photos/katmere/63785117/; license details there.)

If Your Juror Were Writing On Line, Could You Find It?

"Is that a juror responding to a verdict in the comments of this blog?"  That was the E-mail I got yesterday from sharp-eyed and generous Eric Turkewitz of New York Personal Injury Law Blog.  Sure enough, it was. 

"I would just like to ask that no one judge."

There are jurors who blog, and jurors who read blogs, so jurors commenting on blogs had to be next.  In her excellent Trial Ad Notes on Saturday, the University of Washington's Mary Whisner wrote about a recent $5 million jury verdict against a Seattle doctor, in a lawsuit brought by the family of a patient who died.  Mary's post noted the contentious and sometimes nasty on-line "sound-off" comments to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's story on the verdict.  Later on Saturday, this anonymous comment appeared to Mary's post:

I would just like to ask that no one judge neither the Dr. in this case nor the family. I was able to sit and hear this case for the past five weeks and given the task of determining whether this Dr. was negligent or not.  All I want to say is that this is unfortunate for all parties involved.

It's an innocent remark -- nothing here for postverdict motions -- but the fact that it's there at all is striking.  If you're starting to get overwhelmed thinking of all the ways your jurors might be talking or reading about your case online, you're not alone. 

After, words

The juror's comment highlights a different point as well, a point about timing.  So far, this issue has come up mostly in the context of jurors who are on line while the trial was in progress.  A more likely time to find jurors on line, though, may be after the trial is over.  At that point, they're free to talk about the case -- and they're often still caught up in the case itself, in a way that makes them want to talk about it. 

The reasons they're caught up in it vary.  Some are simply impressed by the jury process itself, like New Jersey State Senator Robert Martin.  (He's the one who wrote a New Jersey Law Journal article about the deliberations he participated in, and got the verdict challenged for his efforts.)  Others are troubled by the evidence, as Mary Whisner's commenter seems to have been.  Then there are jurors who see their verdict criticized, and take it personally.  When Seventh Circuit Judge Michael Kanne, speaking in dissent eighteen months after the trial, called parts of the jury process in Illinois governor George Ryan's trial "totally astounding," the Chicago Tribune found jurors willing to defend their verdict as though it had happened yesterday:

"It's a shame that [the defense attorneys] feel the need to come after jurors with false allegations in a desperate attempt to get their client off," juror Leslie Losacco wrote in an e-mail. "I now understand why people despise most defense lawyers."

Searching 101

How can a trial lawyer hope to find all this?  Set up searches, and keep them open until you couldn't possibly need them.  Some ideas:

• If you don't know how to set up feed searches, preferably collected in a feed reader, it's time to learn.  This skill will help you in a thousand ways, long before you ever find a juror comment.  I've tried several feed readers and right now I like Google Reader best; it's quick and meshes well with Google's other services.
• Start with searches for the name of your case, plus "jury duty" and your city.  Then expand to some of the words that a juror might use to describe the case without identifying it.
• Set the searches to scan both blogs and news stories.
• Most searches will pick up "main" stories but not the comments to those stories.  If there's a blog post or news story highly relevant to your case, click through to it and look for comments, possibly multiple times. 
• Let others know you're looking.  No amount of searching could pick up all the possible places a juror might talk about your case.  I see nearly everything about jurors on line, but I would have missed this story if it hadn't been for Eric Turkewitz.

(Photo by striatic at http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/1629269/; license details there.)

Why Don't TV Jurors Talk?

Sometimes I don't know I've had a useful thought until someone else articulates it.  Here's a question I've mused on from time to time but never thought to write about:  If Americans are fascinated by jury duty, and my time blogging here has convinced me that they are, why is the role of a juror in a movie or television show almost always a nonspeaking part? 

Those silent TV jurors

There's "Twelve Angry Men," the famous exception, and then there's the rule.  From "Perry Mason" to "Matlock" to "Boston Legal," from "Witness For The Prosecution" to "My Cousin Vinny," there they sit, the silent jurors.  They're ethnically diverse, well-groomed, attentive, financially comfortable -- and completely passive.  It's a phenomenon explored in Marquette Law professor David Papke's article, "12 Angry Men is Not an Archetype: Reflections on the Jury in Contemporary Popular Culture," available here on SSRN.  Prof. Papke is willing to draw conclusions from the pattern:

I suggest that while 12 Angry Men invites us to envision the jury as a fundamental building block for American life, the standard contemporary portrayal of the jury is instead a sobering suggestion of how we have actually come to see juries in the context of our increasingly attenuated and formalistic democracy.

It's an interesting article for the reader, and it must have been great fun to write.  Imagine the popcorn you'd consume, doing the research that would qualify you to write this paragraph:

Classic films from the 1950s such Witness for the Prosecution (1957), I Want to Live (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and The Young Philadelphians (1959) featured courtroom trials.5 More recent Hollywood dramas such as The Accused (1988), A Few Good Men (1992), and A Time to Kill (1996) as well as comedies such as My Cousin Vinny (1992), Liar, Liar (1997), and Legally Blonde (2001) continue the trend. On television, series such as L. A. Law (NBC; 1986-94), Ally McBeal (FOX; 1997-2002), and The Practice (ABC; 1997- 2004) always portrayed one or more of their lawyer characters litigating in each episode, and current series such as Law & Order (NBC; 1990-present), Boston Legal (ABC; 2004- present), and Shark (CBS; 2006-present) do the same.

Art imitates life, or part of it

The lack of curiosity among film and television writers about jury duty is odd, but in one way it's completely consistent with the jury-duty experience most people report.  Few jurors experience the high drama of, say, the jury that convicted Illinois governor George Ryan.  Instead, by far the majority of people who report for jury duty aren't selected for juries at all -- so their day in the courthouse really is silent, passive, and individual.  I've talked about a few jury blogs describing this dreary experience, and more examples come up all the time.  Last week brought a good one, when law student Luke Gilman reported for duty.  Forgive me for quoting a cite to myself:

I had jury duty today. It was originally scheduled for February but I rescheduled to fit it in the pathetically short break between our summer and fall semesters. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m a student so I guess I could claim an exemption, but I didn’t want to get out of it. Far from the typical reluctant juror claiming rampant racism or homophobia to get out of jury duty, I saw it as a rare chance to see things from the other side of the jury box. I thought I might even join the ranks of the blogging jurors sometimes featured in Anne Reed's Deliberations. Alas, it was not to be.

I spent 4 hours sitting in the juror holding pen, waiting for my number to be called. When it finally was called it was only to tell me that my services would not be needed. Could I come back tomorrow I asked? “Um, no,” I was told by a fairly incredulous officer, “you’re free to go, you got a release.” Sigh. I don’t think there would have been any shortage of volunteers to trade places among the 50 or so people who went ahead of me. Oh well.

His day had all the excitement of a TV jury's.

____________

Source note:  I'm glad for the chance to cite Luke Gilman's terrific law blog, The Blawgraphy.  I first noticed it in June, when he mused on the questions that might have been asked in a voir dire in the Duke lacrosse case, and ended up with as clear a statement of how experiences are likely to shape jurors' attitudes as any I've seen.  Right now he's observing the conversation several blogs are having about the billable hour, and translating it into advice for law students. 

(Photo by Soon at http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomecho/298010188/; license details there.)

We R Deliberating Where RU?

....judge really helping w/jurors...
still having difficulties with #30
...any ideas???
keep pushing on ur side
did not understand ur thoughts on statute
but received links.

It's not the kind of message a juror is supposed to be sending to a fellow juror at 10:09 on a Sunday night in the middle of deliberations.  Nor is it the kind of thing a defense lawyer expects to find, sent anonymously, in the morning mail.    But when the defense lawyer's client is Richard Scrushy, you can bet the issue won't go away quickly.

"Articles usent outstanding!"

A follow-up message, sent about half an hour later, isn't any better:

I can't see anything we miss'd. u?
articles usent outstanding! gov & pastor up s---t creek.
good thing no one likes them anyway. all public officials
r scum; especially this 1. pastor
is reall a piece of work
...they missed before, but we won't
...also, keepworking on 30
... will update u on other meetingz

Then there's the reply:

Great info 4 r friends.
% of prosecution increases dramatically.
Could not find that when I surfed it.
Gov/Pastor GONE....

If you're lost track of the Scrushy story, here's a thumbnail.  Richard Scrushy has faced two criminal trials in the last few years.  In 2005, he was acquitted of fraud charges over the failure of HealthSouth, the company he ran.  The government had better luck in 2006, though, trying Scrushy and former Alabama governor Don Siegelman for corruption relating to campaign donations.  The corruption jury -- which included the two late-night E-mailing jurors -- reported twice that it was deadlocked before finally convicting Scrushy and Siegelman last June. 

Some E-mails between jurors surfaced soon after the verdict.  Armed with those and a juror affidavit ("I was confused between all the evidence and other Internet stuff that some of the jurors brought in and was talking about . . . They were pulling stuff out of files[.]"), Scrushy asked the trial judge for a new trial.  The trial judge interviewed the jurors and denied the request in mid-December.  Scrushy was sentenced to prison a few weeks ago.  (All these links are to the WSJ Law Blog, a great source for Scrushy chronology.)

In the meantime, however, defense counsel got another anonymous envelope in late December, containing the E-mails above.  The ensuing motion to reconsider wasn't decided, so the defense has now filed a motion in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals asking the appellate court to issue subpoenas itself, requiring the production of evidence that would show whether the E-mails are genuine -- including, apparently, the personal computer hard drives belonging to the jurors in question.  (The proposed subpoenas themselves aren't attached to the copy of the motion I have, but that's the clear import of the motion.)  The government filed a response to the Eleventh Circuit motion last week. 

Weird new world

There's a plateful of food for thought here.  The idea of a federal court of appeals issuing subpoenas would be provocative enough, but I'm more distracted by the text-message quality of these E-mails, and what it might portend.  If you've ever taken a deposition and watched opposing counsel and his client E-mail each other in front of your eyes, you can start to imagine how jurors at opposite ends of a table might have their own conversation even as the group debate swirls around them.  When the jurors go home, they can find each other instantly:  RU there? 

And the slowish handheld connection that even a few months ago might have discouraged jurors from jury-room Internet research is now, if the commercials are right, up to full speed.  Those iPhone commercials are pretty incredible.  Imagine how much you could find out about Richard Scrushy if you had one of those things in jury deliberations.

(Photo by Dewayne Smith at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dewayne_smith/433951055/; license details there.)