Juror Tweets Could Create Mistrial 148
nandemoari writes "Russell Wright and his construction company, Stoam Holdings, recently lost a $12 million dollar lawsuit brought by investors. But lawyers for the firm have complained that juror Johnathan Powell's Twitter comments broke rules when discussing the civil case with the public. The arguments in this dispute center on two points. Powell insists (and the evidence appears to back him up) that he did not make any pertinent updates until after the verdict was given; if that's the case, the objection would presumably be thrown out. If Powell did post updates during the trial, the judge must decide whether he was actively discussing the case. Powell says he only posted messages and did not read any replies. Intriguingly, the lawyers for Stoam Holding are not arguing so much that other people directly influenced Powell's judgment, rather that he might have felt a need to agree to a spectacular verdict to impress the people reading his posts."
Tweet? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't wait til "Twitter" passes and we can stop using retarded words like "tweet".
Twitter is not some genius website worth the $55,000,000 it's raised. I could recreate the entire site's functionality in 15 minutes.
It's the Juror's Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
He made tweets like:
"So, Johnathan, what did you do today?' Oh, nothing really. I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else's money!"
and
"Oh, and nobody buy Stoam. It's bad mojo, and they'll probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is $12M lighter. http://www.stoam.com/ [stoam.com]."
He was clearly show-boating for his tweeter fans, even if in jest. Therefore, I do think there is a chance that he "felt a need to agree to a spectacular verdict to impress the people reading his posts."
While it is sucks that there may have to be a retrial, the important of impartial justice supersedes the inconvenience.
Re:It's like notetaking? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's like notetaking? (Score:5, Insightful)
The lawyers of the defendant are claiming that he was showboating his power, something that's impossible to do with a pad of paper.
Re:It's the Juror's Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
If only I had mod points. The potential issue is that a juror may have been showboating (i.e., not being impartial). The fact that it was done using Twitter is irrelevant. It's really no different than if he went home and said these things to everyone in person...except that the lawyers probably wouldn't have known about it then.
Re:Tweet? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could recreate the entire site's functionality in 15 minutes.
The functionality isn't what's important, it's the community that is. Plenty of people have done MySpace and Facebook prior to both of them being around (webrings, GeoCities, etc are all related to those two sites) but the biggest draw is the number of users who have latched to make it successful.
That said, if you come up with a website that has the same (or preferably better) functionality and better network scalability and uptime as well as attract a customer base that rivals Twitter, then by all means go for it. In fact, if it's good enough I'm sure people will eventually make the switch and make you rich.
Let me know what retarded word you come up with to describe your service's micro-blog posts so that we can make fun of it here and get modded appropriately too.
Guh. (Score:4, Insightful)
God, it really seems that as we've adopted more and more ways to communicate, we've completely forgotten how to do it properly, and etiquette hasn't kept pace. When I was a kid we had corded phones. No real chance of taking one into the bathroom with you, so there never needed to be a rule against talking on the phone while taking a crap. But if you asked anyone whether it would be acceptable were it technologically possible, they'd probably have reacted with disgust. But today? I see and hear people on their phones in the restroom all the damn time.
So maybe it's the judge's fault for not realizing what mouth-breathers people can be, and explicitly forbidding tweeting, blogging, etc? I dunno.
Spectacular (Score:2, Insightful)
>> rather that he might have felt a need to agree to a spectacular verdict
A verdict so spectacular that 11 other people came to the same conclusion without using twitter?
Re:It's like notetaking? (Score:4, Insightful)
If he didn't post anything prior to the verdict, it's a tempest in a teapot. Jurors can say whatever the eff they want once they are out of the courtroom. How many times have big news shows had interviews with jurors that have started along the lines of "And how far into the the trial did you decide that the defendant needed to fry?" In that he's lucky he's in the US, as he's still get his ass handed to him in other countries.
If he posted anything during the trial proper, then I imagine it's not going to matter whether he got feedback or not. He's going to get his ass handed to him. The judge isn't going to care about the technicalities, it'll be pure contempt of court.
Re:It's the Juror's Fault (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think the lawyers have anything here. Whether you email all your friends afterwards, step out on the courthouse lawn and scream it, or gloat about it on your Facebook status....that's what you get with a jury of peers.
If you want robots deciding your fate, I wouldn't recommend breaking the law.
Re:It's the Juror's Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Are those really his posts? If so, then there's clearly grounds for a mistrial.
Disclaimer: My legal training is from /. plus Law and Order.
Re:Anyone else annoyed by the twitter fad? (Score:3, Insightful)
It does make it more annoying in the short term. The really good news is that it's also the sign of the beginning of the end of the fad. Vacuous sites like Twitter are flash-in-the-pan. There's no real substance, nor purpose, nor income. The only reason people use them is peer pressure and fashion.
The one sure-fire way of making something deeply uncool is to let a politician use it. Thus, hopefully, Twitter will be as dead as Myspace is in less that 18 months max. The sooner the better.
I could care less about the service, because in the real world it simply doesn't exist for me -- and never will. I don't use it, and I know no-one who does. It is just extremely annoying to people whining on about it everywhere online, like it's something important.
I'd really love to meet the owners of the Twitter site, just to have the chance to punch them in the face for being the most obnoxious sock-puppeteers this planet has ever seen.
It depends (Score:4, Insightful)
IANAL yadda yadda yadda, but I've served on 6 juries to date. And an instruction that was emphasized repeatedly by the judges in every case was "do not talk about the case outside of the jury room until the case is over". (Note: At least in my part of Indiana, jurors are allowed to discuss the case *amongst themselves* during all phases of the trial (except, obviously, when court is in active session), provided they do not attempt to come to a verdict before the official deliberation phase of the trial, and *all* members of the jury must be at least listening to any discussion, even if not actively participating.)
If this guy twittered after the trial was over and the verdict had been delivered, then I see no problems. But if he was broadcasting before the verdict was handed down by the judge, then I think there are indeed grounds for a mistrial...and Mr. Bigmouth Juror should get a few days in jail himself to think about his actions.
And were you on the losing side, I'd be willing to bet each and every one of you would be fighting for a mistrial on the same grounds.
Re:Spectacular (Score:5, Insightful)
The defendant is entitled to a unanimous verdict from twelve impartial jurors, not eleven. Even if you let that requirement slide there is still the possibility that the twelfth juror unduly influenced his colleagues so he would be able to publish some spectacular posts.
Re:Tweet? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've made many websites, far more complex than that pile of trash. Feel free to look at the one in my sig.
And they scale effectively up to millions of users while maintaining 98.7% uptime or better?
I agree twitter is baffling in its popularity, and probably overvalued - but in my own experience when someone says "I can code X in 20 minutes" it usually indicates a serious lack of understanding of the requirements ;) *
* "Hello World" excepted from this.
Re:It's the Juror's Fault (Score:1, Insightful)
The potential issue is that a juror may have been showboating (i.e., not being impartial).
The summary says this was done *after* the trial.
In that case, wouldn't you kind of, I don't know, expect the juror to not be impartial anymore. You know, having arrived at a decision and all.
Re:Guh. (Score:3, Insightful)
What part of "He insists he didn't say anything until after the verdict" don't you understand?
And this is explicitly mentioned in the summary, you don't even have to RTFA to see it.
Let's see:
Powell insists (and the evidence appears to back him up) that he did not make any pertinent updates until after the verdict was given;
Someone doing something wrong and claiming they didn't... THAT"s new ;)
Thing is, if you did RTFAs and 'tweets' you'd know that in spite of what he [and the summary] /said/ he did, he did make posts during breaks before the verdict was rendered. Seems to me that the question is not whether or not he did it (in spite of his denials), but how relevant the posts actually were .
Now who is the idiot?
Heh.
Re:Tweet? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sounds like your beating us up because you just realized that the universe does not revolve around you.
Life sucks sometimes, especially when the appearance of less skill makes more money. Unfortunately it doesn't matter how much skill you have unless you can market it effectively.
Re:Tweet? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like the thought process of someone looking at an abstract painting, like a Jackson Pollock, and saying, 'My five year old could have done that!"
The point is, you didn't, they did, and you can only wish that you had.
I did RTFAs. It doesn't say what you say it says. (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, if you did RTFAs and 'tweets' you'd know that in spite of what he [and the summary] /said/ he did, he did make posts during breaks before the verdict was rendered. Seems to me that the question is not whether or not he did it (in spite of his denials), but how relevant the posts actually were .
How do you figure this? I read both articles and dug back to his twitter stream. Maybe you're confused because the ars article gives times in a different timezone than his twitter stream. Though it took me all of ten seconds to figure out and verify that.
Nothing I can find says he made any posts like what you are implying. There's one post between him being selected and after the verdict. It's about french fries. I fail to see the evidence you seem to be trying to make people believe is there to bolster your case. Just admit the OP was probably wrong and move on.
Re:Tweet? (Score:3, Insightful)
With "the correct tools," flying my harem to the moon and back without incident is trivial.
Where I work, 0.5% uptime would get you a "promoted" to a window office, complete with an endless stream of paper files for you to sort. Strike that -- it'd get you fired.
As for 20 million users, you'll want to have better a better notion about scaling than "trivial," unless you're serving a static HTML page via Akamai, with the text "Hello, world."
10 million uniques, tens of millions of database-driven pageviews per day, and hundreds of millions of user-created content records is Twitter's current situation. I'm mildly curious what qualifies you to judge that as "trivial."
Any new technology, especially one undergoing tremendous growth, is going to hit road bumps. Gmail strands users for hours at a time. Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, and Facebook have all had their share of tech difficulties. Nothing trivial about any of those operations, not now, nor in the past when their user numbers were more like Twitter's.
Re:punish him (Score:1, Insightful)
Funny, my judge made it clear no to discus the case with anyone DURING THE TRAIL. When we were released we were told we could say anything we wanted too. Do you have any evidence he posted during the trial?