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.
Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.
You won’t immediately be sent to the stocks for saying “I don’t want to answer”, the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don’t want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney asking the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.
Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren’t prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.
They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don’t want to answer and say so, it’s unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.
Causing prejudice is a bad way to prevent predjudice
I laughed and now people are staring at me.
This is really helpful, thanks.
This seems correct. A judge (generally, without looking into all local rules) could technically rule that you are compelled to answer, and then continuing to refuse could lead to a contempt of court charge.
But the whole point of the process is to find a suitable juror, so if interacting with a potential juror is like pulling teeth in voir dire, the most practical solution seems to be dismissal by the judge so everyone can move along.
What exactly is the legal definition of “social media” anyway?
Personally I don’t consider lemmy or reddit to be social media, they’re more like several forums in a trench-coat.
Yeah, that term has gotten overly broad. I like to separate it into two groups. Personal social media, where you use your real name and stuff, and (for lack of a better term) anonymous social media, where you just use some screen name. If anything you post a comment in is social media most news sites are social media. The term needs to be reigned in and I think should only apply to the personal variety.
I can’t wait to give them my Nintendo credentials and cry as they question me about my 1500 hours on Splatoon 💀
They are by definition social media…
I’d say they are because I think I’m getting addicted to Lemmy. It’s a habitual task in my free time now.
Going by that logic benzodiazepines are social media
I was kinda making a light hearted joke but if you want to go by the formal definition, Lemmy is still considered social media
Social media:
Interactive forms of media that allow users to interact with and publish to each other, generally by means of the Internet.
Lemmy 100% replaced reddit for me . Glad I found something where if it starts getting shitty, I can move to a new instance and stay on the same service.
I hope switching instances is more streamlined in the future.
Nobody was being asked for their social media credentials, it’s not like you have to give them full access. What happened was that the attorneys looked the jurors up and went through their old posts, all stuff that was publicly available. One of the jurors they dismissed posted a picture of people celebrating Biden’s election win, and that was enough to show that they were biased.
and that was enough to show that they were biased.
no, it was enough to show that they MAY be biased. The juror in question thought the event was in celebration of caregivers.
not sure if you’re deliberately distorting the truth or just uninformed but either way… classy.
Absolutely not. If asked, just refuse to answer, don’t lie. But, I’ve been summoned a few times and they’ve never asked about that, so far.
I just want to add, that this is completely hypothetical. I was just fantasizing about slipping onto Trump’s jury.
There are much easier ways to get a lifetime of death threats.
But, would it be worth it?
Yea, I’d still volunteer. Honestly, serving on a jury judging Trump you’d be contributing to the preservation of democracy in a more significant way than pretty much anyone else.
So uh… for managed democracy and super earth!
Those feelings are the sort of thing that would get you disqualified from the jury.
Oh, definitely… but I’m ineligible anyways.
I’d be right there with you. ✊
First, wow. Rent free and all that.
Second, I don’t want to be on anyone’s jury. And if I were selected for a jury, the government is going to have to work damn hard to get me to convict anyone.
I’ve been rejected from a jury pool before. Poor choice by the legal defender because of their own presumptions about me.
I feel like saying “I do not believe in convicting anyone” is a good way to not be on a jury. Otherwise, I hear you can just mention the magic words “jury nullification” and get kicked out at roughly Lightspeed.
“I’m a prison abolitionist” or “I support the prisoners union” work wonders as well. If you go far enough left it’s harder to stay on a jury than get kicked off
How would that be enforced?
If the court asks you to provide it and you don’t, you can go in jail pretty much indefinitely under contempt of court.
please post a precedent for this, citation requested.
Sure thing.
Under Rule 37 of the FRCP, a deponent’s failure to answer can also be treated as contempt of court. Direct contempt of court is punishable without trial.
Punitive contempt of court actions serve as a punishment and can include a jail sentence of up to 6 months
Remedial contempt of court actions place the individual into jail until such time as they agree to remedy a situation
A 73-year-old Philadelphia lawyer walked out of prison July 10, 2009 after serving 14 years for contempt of court – the longest term ever served for contempt.
TY!
No.
Tired of the constant erosion of civil liberties. This ain’t civilization
Can’t you just politely decline and then they relieve you from duty? Or can they coerce you into doing a digital striptease for them?
Hellll no
Legally, wouldn’t you have to?
When you’re answering the questionnaire, you’re already sworn-in and under oath, so I would assume you’d legally have to. Not sure what the penalty would be, though, but I’m not really interested in finding out.
I guess they’d also have to prove it’s yours, though. Still, even though I use a pseudo-anonymous name online, I don’t post anything I wouldn’t want my real name next to.
Edit: OTOH, you could probably refuse to answer which would likely get you dismissed. IANAL, though. The last time I was summoned for jury duty, they didn’t ask about social media accounts or anything like that. Just a few questions that would have indicated whether I could be impartial.
That feels like a privacy issue, maybe related to the topic of whether or not they can force you to unlock your phone? I don’t know where the current law is on that.
Yeah, that’s why I added that bit at the bottom. You could probably safely decline to answer, but they’d likely dismiss you for that. Which, if you just want out of jury duty, may be a way to do it lol. Either way, you should definitely not lie and say “no”.
I’m on the go, but I believe the mechanics for the most jurisdictions is that a refusal to answer would then be put to the judge as to if an answer must be compelled or not.
If you assert a right to silence for possible self-incrimination reasons, or if the question is very personal and the invasive nature outweighs the value of the question, a judge may rule against needing to answer. If the judge rules that you are compelled to answer, a continued refusal may lead to a contempt charge. That’s something of a worst case and I think it’s more likely the judge would dismisss as a practical matter. This would not cost the attorneys any of their freebie jury dismissals.
That means if you had for example highly biased social media history and were refusing to answer because you’re trying to sneak something past and get seated, it really doesn’t help you because you get dismissed by the judge and it doesn’t even cost the “opposing” attorney anything. If the judge rules that you don’t have to answer, the “opposing” attorney can still dismiss you because they got a bad vibe.
If you have biased social media history and you’re trying to get out of jury duty, if anything you’d want to talk about it as much as possible.
There are situations where responsiveness is compelled. If a judge rules that a question must be answered in voir dire, that’s a situation.
The solution, as it were, to compelled speech is that for example if you somehow are compelled into admitting to a crime, that speech couldn’t be criminally used against you. There has been at least one high profile case where compelled speech was used for a criminal conviction which we ended up being reversed.
Of course, a situation in jury selection where a question would lead to a 5th amendment issue and still be compelled seems very unlikely. More likely questions would simply be uncomfortable to answer. A judge has discretion to determine if a question is more invasive than useful. But something like social media posting related to the case seems like something most judges would allow.
Some comments in this thread are answering as if lawyers would be asking for the passwords or something. That’s not what’s happening.
From the thread comments, I believe OP is asking about giving up social media between the summons and the selection as a means to more likely end up on a jury.
Attorneys might ask about past social media use and you are supposed to tell the truth. I don’t feel comfortable with people scrubbing their social media history and then lying to the court about what may or may not have been on it, which is the undertone I’m getting in the thread.
In a higher profile case, bigger and more expensive attorney teams will probably spend more time and effort to snoop on prospective jurors, on lower profile cases attorneys will probably just ask jurors questions and look at their answer forms.
Disclaimer: Not a US citizen, but I think the reporting threshold is similar.
So, I recently applied for a bunch of US work visas as part of my job. C1/D, B1, and B2 to be precise. (Mostly to get my TWIC for easy port entry, honestly). And part of the process involved listing my social media accounts.
I don’t use my Facebook anymore, and my lemmy (and then reddit) account isn’t really significant. Beyond those, the only one with my name on it is my LinkedIn, which does in fact hilight an aspect of my job that shows why the above mentioned visas would be useful for me. So I ended up only listing my linkedin.
Visas approved. I don’t think anyone cares hard enough to actually check unless your name is Daddy Al-Baddy
The court has more important things to do than inquire about your internet history, and you’d have to be a moron to bring up the subject.
Why would they ask about social media at all?
Somehow I feel like you haven’t read the news in the last 72 hours…
Man it must be nice to live in wherever bubble @morphballganon is in.
I don’t know either. I don’t do any TV news. There must more important things going on than jury selection in loser Trump’s case. That said, what happened with this social media jury thing?
Well_
It’s the first criminal prosecution of a US President, ever.
Like it’s never happened before. So from a history, unique event perspective there is that.
But also, yeah it’s like totally non news for one person to be in the jury selection process for a trial.
The news is that Court room reporters via Fox were basically doing jurors.
All good points.
Oh, doxing. Yeah. The conservative media machine doesn’t sleep on one inch. They have unlimited money, labor, tech, and time. Their goal is to make public service work contentious and adversarial, and stop government from working, especially on things like registrars of voters, boards of education, and of course jury service.
Of course that was going to be an issue in this case. Need to start treating interference with government service as a serious crime.
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Because it’s in everyone’s best interest that people with overt bias are dismissed. In high profile cases it’s standard practice for both sides to do pretty intensive research on individual prospective jurors (they get a list), and that often includes scouring the web for their social media accounts. If they find something you posted, and you didn’t disclose your account when asked, you could be in trouble.
I don’t think it’s usually standard to ask specifically about social media accounts, at least in normal mundane cases, but in a crazy case like this, it can say a lot about a person’s ability to be impartial.
Why would they ask about social media at all?
I was just about to ask this same question in a different thread. I’m in a similar situation, in that Lemmy is the only social media I use (Reddit before the API crap), but I’ve never used my real name. I’d happily own all my comments, but the point of an anonymous account is that I don’t have to. I guess when you’re under oath it doesn’t matter, you have to truthfully answer the question that’s asked.
Thanks for the participation everyone!
My conclusion is that the question is moot. You most likely won’t be asked to give up your entire social media activity. But you can be asked about the content if it’s relevant to the case.
Perjury is serious beyond the penalties, and i solemnly swear that i had no intentions of doing so.
What if you are a heavy social media user, and the person on trial is a heavy social media user? Should they not get a jury of their peers?
