I have old Facebook and Twitter accounts, maybe some others. I’m old so there’s a MySpace account out there. But I’ve mostly been using reddit the last decade or so, and have migrated to Lemmy. Now, Lemmy is the only social media i use. Recent news got me thinking about this question.
Answering the question in chronological order, during the voir dire portion of the jury selection process, jury candidates would be asked a battery of questions by the parties to the case, plus by the judge, to determine if the candidates can be sufficiently impartial as jurors. Some qualities are – legally speaking – so inherently prejudicial that a juror could not sit on the jury, such as being a active judge in a different court. Other qualities are potentially prejudicial, such as if a candidate is a police officer and the case is about police brutality.
For a case where social media evidence will play a large part, the parties may not want a juror that is keenly familiar with memes and the latest online trends. The lawyers would be permitted to ask about social media use, and could remove the candidate if their answer indicates some articulable bias that isn’t an illegal category (eg sex, race). Alternatively, they can remove a candidate peremptorily, without describing their reasoning, but the number of these removals is limited.
Since the question supposes that the jury has already been selected, it may have been that the case didn’t involve social media or the lawyers and judge didn’t ask about it. However, jurors are always asked if they have any reason they cannot be impartial, so jurors would have to speak up if they have any doubts at all, vis-a-vis their anonymous social media accounts.
Still, after the selection process, when the jury is impaneled, they will be asked to avoid seeking out relevant news articles or discussing the case with anyone outside the jury room. This is not as rigorous as sequestration, but this would include avoiding posting on social media about the case. Jurors are usually free to carry on with the rest of their lives, with that in mind.
Thus, to answer the question, an anonymous social media account doesn’t need to be “given up”, unless it would affect the case somehow. But having such an account is potentially disclosable during the jury selection process. Ideally, the inquiring attorney would simply ask about the nature of the anonymous account, rather than forcing them to out their account.
can you refuse to answer the question. feels like this is about your personal life. is that required. im fine if they kick me off but I would be mad if I was given contempt for not answering.
I genuinely don’t know what happens then. At least in California, the questions for the prospective jurors are required to be germane to the case at hand, with final discretion in the hands of the trial judge. But supposing that one of the attorneys does pose a fairly invasive question and the judge doesn’t block it, I would guess that contempt of court becomes possible. The California Rules of Court only suggest that a “sequestered voir dire” be “considered” but again, there’s significant discretion to the trial judge. So typically, voir dire will be out and open to all the other jurors, the attorney, and anyone in the gallery.
Of course, any seasoned judge should be aware that some jurors simply don’t want to serve or participate, and while they can’t officially endorse that reality, a sincere explanation from the jury candidate that they don’t want to answer the question often ends with the judge simply excusing the candidate and they just go home, having fulfilled their civil obligation.
The judge would have to be extremely annoyed by something else to consider contempt charges against sincere members of the public. This is the reverse from perjury, where lying to the court is not taken kindly at all.
The problem is that while on its face the question seems reasonable it quickly becomes more and more absurd the longer you consider it.
ANY online account could be considered social media these days by the prevailing overly broad definitions used. Email? Amazon? ISP subscriber? Newspaper subscription? Cloud storage? Image hosting? Online diary? Tech support forum? Teams account through work? Almost universally they all either include social media components or could be defined as such by the overly broad definitions common today. The question has about as much meaning as asking if the juror has ever used the Internet at all.
What is “the question”?
Because I doubt the questions in a voir dire would simply be “have you ever used social media?” but would a series of questions responding to the answers, all tailored to finding out if the juror is interacting with material that is prejudical.
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