In this digital age, is it still possible to completely avoid juror bias on the big cases?
***Update: Clayston Weatherston has been found guilty of murdering Sophie Elliot. The jury has spoken.***
During the course of the Clayton Weatherston murder/manslaughter trial, public interest and discussion has been driven by an immense amount of media coverage. We, the public, have seen all the juicy bits on our 6pm news, day in, day out – all the best scenes, comments, questions and answers, almost as much as the people in the courtroom.
Surely, those 11 jurors – whom are not sequestered (cooped up), and could be reading this right now, and anything else they like – have been influenced by SOME form of personal opinion outside of the courtroom.
Everywhere you go on the net, people are giving their opinions on this case – Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, whatever. You can’t really avoid it.
If one of the big media outlets did happen to accidentally publish something sub-judicial, it is made 100x worse by bloggers and commentators keen for a scoop posting readily available screen-shots and links to the material, even after it is removed.
Inquisitive jurors may not have found the cached versions of the prejudicial material, had bloggers and twitterers not found, extracted, and re-published it in a readily available form. How many people even know how to find a cached file? Or would think to do so?
So what can we do about it?
Hell, not much. We have freedom of information and opinion, and that means the media can cover what they want, and people are curious by nature, so they will more than likely listen and watch. So possibly, the only way it could be achieved would be to keep the jurors in seclusion for the entire course of the case.
Internet name suppression has been tried, notably by Judge David Harvey in 2008, it didn’t work. People just openly defied the suppression, and nothing happened to them.
So at the moment, on the big cases, it’s like the whole of New Zealand is the jury. Good thing? We hear and see what the media reports, which might not always be the whole picture.
When are the laws going to catch up with the Internet? Thoughts?
