Cali Lawyer Suspended Over Blogging While Serving as Juror

I thought the first and best article to post on my return from the illness that has knocked me off line is one where the feature had to do with lawyers and blogging.

A 40-year-old California attorney has had his law license suspended for 45 days over a trial blog he wrote while serving as a juror. Because of a blog post by Frank Russell Wilson, an appeals court reversed and remanded the felony burglary case, reports the California Bar Journal.

Although reportedly warned by the judge not to discuss the case, orally or in writing, Wilson apparently made a lawyerly distinction concerning blogs: “Nowhere do I recall the jury instructions mandating I can’t post comments in my blog about the trial," he writes, before forging on with unflattering descriptions of both the judge and the defendant. He also failed to identify himself as a lawyer to the trial participants, the bar journal notes.

Still, the whole point of blogging and texting and googling comes into play in another court of law, does it not? This is the wave of the future, and I dare say, the tide of the present. Either ride the wave like a surfer on Black's Beach, or get sucked under the powerful waters of the new reality. If you make a fool of yourself in court on a Monday, someone will blog about it on Tuesday.

You can tell jurors not to google and be as effective as telling Iranian protestors not to gather in the street. You can torch a car for insurance and while you think you were alone, a gas station video camera catches you buying the gasoline. You can fly through a red light and some computer mails you a ticket the next day after the snapshot sent an email with your license plate on it to another computer which printed out your name. You think you are alone. You are not. George Orwell is here with you. It is 1984, but it just took till 2009 to get here.

People used to write in diaries, now their unedited fortunes appear on facebook, my space, linked in, and blogs. We use the 'Net to connect with the past and link to the future. What that lawyer did in that trial was ride the wave, but he bucked the court, disobeyed the judge, and paid a price.

Astor Trial Begins With Judicial Warning About 'Twittering'

There will be no Twittering in the courtroom. No 'google' mistrial here.

http://browardlawblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/florida-google-mistrial-captures-ny.html

On the heels of a NY Times featuring revealing a stunning number of jurors using the Internet during a trial here in South Florida, a jury being seated in New York City is being told to stay away from their Blackberrys.

It is the blockbuster trial of famed philanthropist Brooke Astor's son which opened Monday. A judge told 200 potential jurors to put away their BlackBerrys.

"I understand there is a temptation to review [news] stories," Supreme Court Justice Kirke Bartley said as he ordered panel members to stay away from their computers. "You are not to conduct research...particularly on the Internet."

"Blogging, BlackBerrys, whatever," are prohibited, he said in the nearly 10-minute lecture.

"There have been reports from all over about jurors Twittering and blogging," said Ken Warner, a lawyer for Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, who is charged with looting his mother's fortune.

Warner was referring to the popular instant social-networking Web site Twitter. With easy access to the Internet, jurors around the country are increasingly turning to the medium to satisfy their curiosity about a case they are sitting on - and that is resulting in costly mistrials.

Marshall, 84, and once-disbarred lawyer Francis Morrissey, 66, are charged with looting the Alzheimer-stricken Astor's estate by coercing her to update her will. Marshall arrived in court clutching a cane and his wife's hand.

Of 200 original prospective jurors, 30 people who said they could serve for as long as three months - the trial could last that long - were kept for further questioning.

Florida 'Google Mistrial' Captures NY Times and National Attention in Legal Community

Was there not a scene in '12 Angry Men' where a juror retrieves a knife out of his pocket and says that 'look this resembles the murder weapon, and it is a common pocket knife anyone can carry with him at any time; it does not make you a murderer?' Well, yes, there is that scene involving Juror number 8. You know, there is so much you can say about this film, shot in one room, all black and white, names not used, almost worth going back and watching again and again just as a refresher.

But what if the juror to prove his point could have googled the knife in question? What if? Well, it could not have happened in 1957 but it is sure happening in 2009. Forget the juror who brought a dictionary to a trial in the Salesman case last week in Broward causing a mistrial. How many times do you think jurors in the past year might have taken their I Phones and googled up a confusing word directed to them by a judge?



Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in the Southern District admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock, the NY Times reports. Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, a waste of eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.


“We were stunned,” said a defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he had been on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head."



And the NY Times has the story today. It is being called the Google mistrial. It is the future and it has jumped upon us. What was it the comic strip character Pogo said: 'We have met the future and it is us?'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18juries.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

The Internet is a good thing. But jurors have to be free of taint. And now there may have to be a new rules committee which addresses just how much access jurors can have during a trial. Boilerplate instructions no longer suffice. The technological landscape has changed, and so too must we with it. It's a brave new world. I am happy to be here and be part of it. Newspapers may be dying but the information age is not.