Jurors: leave the information age—or go to jail

By Peter Bright

An English court has sentenced a juror to six months in prison for contempt of court after she performed research on the Internet and forced the abandonment of a criminal trial.

Psychology lecturer Theodora Dallas, 34, was a member of the jury in the trial of Barry Medlock, accused of causing grievous bodily harm. She looked up certain information related to the trial on the Internet, came across information concerning Medlock, and told her fellow jurors what she had found. One of them informed the judge, causing the judge to abandon the trial. Medlock was later retried and found guilty.

Dallas claims that she was searching for "grievous bodily harm"—a term of art in English law that encompasses wounding and serious injury—to learn what precisely it meant. She claims that she then added "Luton" to the search terms (the town in England where Dallas worked and the trial was being held), and came across a newspaper report that Medlock had been accused, and acquitted, of rape. Such information is not disclosed in trials lest it prejudice the jury.

Contempt of court proceedings were initiated by Attorney General Dominic Grieve. Three judges, including Lord Judge (sic; Igor Judge is an example of New Scientist's nominative determinism in action), the Lord Chief Justice, found her guilty. Lord Judge said that Dallas had deliberately disobeyed the trial judge's instructions not to search the Internet and that "the damage to the administration of justice is obvious."

This is not the only recent case of an English juror being imprisoned for misusing the Internet. In June 2011, Joanna Fraill was sentenced to eight months for contempt of court after contacting one defendant, Jamie Sewart, during a drug case, and researching another, Sewart's boyfriend Gary Knox. Sewart was acquitted early in the case, and then added Fraill as a friend on Facebook. Sewart asked Fraill about the deliberations over Knox's charges. Sewart received a two-month sentence; Knox is now attempting to have his six-year conviction overturned for jury misconduct.

Fraill felt guilty about what she had done and disclosed it to the court. The Lord Chief Justice acknowledged that Fraill had not attempted to pervert the course of justice, but nonetheless insisted on a custodial sentence to "ensure the continuing integrity of trial by jury."
Enforced ignorance

The position of the juror is a peculiar one. On the one hand, the juror is expected to draw on his experiences as a human when assessing the case presented to him. On the other, the juror is supposed to have essentially no outside knowledge, making his assessment only on the basis of the narrow set of facts presented during the trial. Simultaneously, he should be worldly and wise, but also ignorant and naive.

This has always created tensions, but they have never been more acute than today. Not only is information abundantly available—just type whatever you want to know about in a search engine of your choosing—it's expected and depended on. We don't like it when instant access gets taken away from us. The demand that jurors actively avoid informing themselves, while always unsettling for those of an inquisitive nature, has become completely out-of-step with modern life.

The blanket ban on Internet research also intuitively feels heavy-handed. Jurors in a court might well come across vocabulary and terminology that they're not familiar with; they might not know that a "caucasian male" means a white dude, or that "mens rea" refers to the guilty mind and intent to perform a criminal act. While jurors may, depending on jurisdiction and tradition, be permitted to direct demands for clarification to the judge, looking up such information on the Internet would seem harmless.

Clearly, not all Internet research is so innocuous. Learning that a defendant had previously been accused of rape, even if acquitted, may very well be prejudicial, and such findings are likely to taint the jury.

Between the two extremes of harmless dictionary-style research on the one hand and direct investigation into the defendant on the other is a world that is murky and uncertain. It would be difficult to argue that, for example, learning about the history of grievous bodily harm, and some of the notable relevant court decisions in English history, could lead to a juror making a decision that is unjust. But it might nonetheless lead them to make a decision that is different than the one they would otherwise have made.

Taking a hard line against Internet usage is the only way of avoiding "accidental" tainting. While Fraill admitted to deliberately searching for Gary Knox, Dallas did not claim to have directly sought information about Barry Medlock. Rather, she claims to have found the newspaper article after localizing her search on grievous bodily harm. Even searches that might be widely agreed to be harmless in and of themselves could reveal prejudicial information by accident.

The rules given to jurors are essentially unenforceable. Sequestration of juries is unusual. Most of the time, jurors are unsupervised when not in the courtroom, giving them ample freedom to read whatever they like on the Internet. Both Fraill and Dallas got caught only because they told other people what they had done; had they kept quiet, there would have been literally no way of knowing that they had broken the rules (especially as English jurors may not disclose their deliberations or thought processes to anyone, even after the trial has concluded).

In the world of paper research and legal libraries, fewer jurors were motivated to do the leg-work to learn about the case or its defendants (though the newspaper might pose a temptation when it provided reporting on high-profile cases). But in the modern world of search engines and Wikipedia, where similar research might be conducted routinely throughout the day—just look at how smartphone-toting twentysomethings deal with unfamiliar terms on a restaurant menu, for example—such research isn't just "not unusual," it's increasingly the norm. Against this backdrop, can courts continue to demand that jurors willingly place themselves in a bubble of ignorance, and are such demands even meaningful when they depend so heavily on self-incrimination to enforce?