May Jurors Twitter?

From Scientific American:  

Avid tweeter Jonhathan Powell of Fayetteville, Ark., will have his name in the New York Times tomorrow. How do we know this? From his Twitter feed, of course. That would be the same feed he used last month to tweet about a trial while a member of the jury, which pleased his Twitter fans but prompted the defense attorney in the case to seek a new trial. On what grounds? That Powell’s tweets allegedly showed he was biased against defendant Russell Wright (and his company Stoam Holdings, a building materials company in Fayetteville, Ark.), who was found guilty of mismanaging investors’ funds, The Morning News reports. The jury awarded investors who sued Stoam $12.6 million. 

The article mentions another, similar case.  I will confess that this tweeting/twittering business is one technology I haven’t gotten involved in at all, so I don’t fully understand how it works.  I take it, though, that the twitterer (tweeter? twit?) posts statements for others to read.  For instance, Mr. Powell posted about his experience as a juror, while he was still a juror.

To me, it seems unwise to permit jurors to twitter during the time when they are performing their duties. Just as it would seem unwise to permit jurors to write a column in the morning edition of the newspaper about how things were going on the jury.

Updated:  It turns out that John McCain also twitters.  Perhaps I should try it.  In the summer.

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Wisconsin Supreme Court Accepts Six New Cases, Including Issue of Inherent Authority of Wisconsin Appellate Courts to Grant a New Trial in the Interests of Justice

Supreme Court sealOn March 2, the Wisconsin Supreme Court accepted six new cases for review, five criminal cases and one civil case.

The first case, State v. Henley, 2008AP697, presents an interesting issue regarding the authority of the courts of appeal, or the supreme court, to grant a new trial to a criminal defendant in the interests of justice, without regard to the passing of the time for appeal.  As Judges Vergeront, Lundsten, and Bridge explained in their certification of the questions in the case,

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Failures of Refugee Law and the Inhumane Prospect of Deporting Settled Liberians from the United States

This semester I am teaching a seminar entitled Comparative Refugee and Asylum Law, and last week, one of my students in that course, Vintee Sawnhey, sent me a link to a news article about the thousands of Liberians who fear deportation from the United States because the “deferred enforced departure” status that President Bush extended to them in September 2007 is scheduled to end on March 31, 2009.  

I should probably preface the rest of this long post by explaining that the article Vintee sent me was especially interesting to me because I worked with many Liberians during and just after law school, at Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, now called The Advocates for Human Rights.  Most of my work for that organization involved interviewing prospective asylum-seekers, to assess their credibility and the strength of their claims for asylum.  My work there happened from late 1996 through early 1999, and many of our clients were Liberians.  Minnesota has a relatively large population of Liberians.  (You may want to check out the Minnesota Star-Tribune’s really nice website about Liberians in Minnesota.)

Anyway, as Vintee pointed out, the situation of these Liberians is “pretty relevant to some of our current readings” in my asylum law seminar. Indeed, the situation of the Liberians facing possible deportation later this year illustrates two of the most important ideas in the course:  (1) the legal definition of “refugee” does not include people fleeing from generalized civil war conditions, and (2) offering “temporary” humanitarian protection in place of permanent refugee status to such individuals is problematic, because countries experiencing civil war do not become stable very quickly, and human beings build new lives in the meantime.

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