Facebook in the Dock: Woe 2.0

November 25, 2008

jury_box1.jpg

Oh dear.

Blade, still reeling from Susie Boyt’s counter-intuitive affirmation of implacable good cheer at the expense of cynicism, would prefer not to garner a reputation as a cynic. And yet fresh evidence emerges to support his long-held belief that the British jury system is a farce.

It is a farce because it is relies upon jurors. These are people who fall asleep rather than listen to the evidence, bring their own petty (and no so petty) prejudices to bear, are often not capable of understanding what is going on in front of them and, increasingly, elect to play amateur sleuth via the internet so as to help the case along.

The latest example of a juror shamelessly ignoring what are now standard judicial directions not to look up details of a case on the internet or discuss it online is reported in this story in the Telegraph.  The juror posted details of a sexual assault and child abduction trial on Facebook and asked her friends if they thought the defendants were guilty.

“I don’t know which way to go, so I’m holding a poll,” she wrote. Her Facebook profile did not use privacy settings, so anyone could have read her thoughts and any responses from her friends.

The woman was dismissed from the case, held at Burnley Crown Court, after an anonymous tip off, but for how long are we going to preserve our quaint but absurd faith in the jury system? It appears less sustainable with each day, for no court in the land can adequately police jurors’ use of the internet, short of imprisoning them for the duration of a trial and forbidding them access to any form of modern communications device.

But even more importantly, what price jury nobbling taking a turn towards IT? With an appropriate inducement, a juror might decide to post details of a case on Facebook and thereby create an automatic, potentially trial-stopping contempt of court, but in the absence of this, what’s to stop associates of a defendant creating a Facebook profile of a juror or jurors and having them reveal and debate the evidence, utilising prejudicial information known only to the defendant and those associates? Granted, a court would soon become aware of such a tactic, and a judge would make the requisite orders to forget all about it to the 12 good men and true before him, but by then it could be too late.

The combination of age-old flaws in the jury system and the advent of the internet age make asking 12 people to judge their fellow man a nonsense. Facebook, in such a setting, isn’t about Web 2.0. It’s about Courtroom Woe 2.0. It’s time the judiciary and the legislature alike accepted this.

Pictured: an empty jury box. A good thing, if you ask Blade (but he’s not a cynic).

 

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From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.

Not so right said Fred

February 2, 2012
fred hat

So Farewell, then, Sir Fred Goodwin.

Now you are just Fred.

Not Right Said Fred, but plain Fred.

The Forfeiture Committee did for you.

No one had heard of it before,

But Dave said it had to act, and it did.

Trouble is that no one knows what to think.

Is it ‘Alas, poor Fred‘,

Or ‘Hurray! Sir Fred is dead!’?

We don’t know.

Do you?

By A. Mob, aged 1,378 and a half.