Can the Jury Google Your Client?
What’s the first thing that you do when a new case walks in the door? Realistically, you’re probably running a Google search on the people and companies involved. While Google isn’t the magical tool that it used to be and there are other steps involved in effective due diligence, there is, as yet, no replacement for Google in quickly surfacing obvious red flags like “wasn’t that guy convicted of fraud?” or “isn’t the defendant bankrupt?”
And in your personal life, it’s also hard to beat an internet search for getting you 85% of the way to an answer for essentially any common problem that has a solution.
Given that, it’s not terribly surprising that there are recurrent problems with jurors conducting unauthorized internet research during trial. While only a very unusual juror would drive to the library after court to hunt through microfilm for evidence, it’s a very natural and human impulse to pull out a smartphone and spend ten minutes looking up someone you’ve recently met. This is particularly true if you’ve just been forced to watch them answer aggressive questions all afternoon. Virtually every court tells jurors not to, but that’s more a reflection of the scale of the problem than the effectiveness of the solution.
But what do you need to watch out for when it comes to juror use of the internet? And how can you protect your client from juror sleuthing that you may know nothing about?
There are essentially three categories of juror behavior that you might see, in roughly increasing order of seriousness.
The first category are social media posts by jurors about the trial. You’d think that folks would have more sense, but it comes up with alarming frequency. In 2010, Reuters Legal conducted a three-week study in which it monitored twitter for tweets referring to “jury duty.” It found an essentially unlimited supply, with a new post roughly every three minutes. [1]
And some of things jurors post can be deeply disturbing. For example, in the Chandra Levy trial, a prospective juror was caught tweeting the following during jury selection:
Guilty. Guilty. I say no. I will not be swayed. Practicing for jury duty. [2]
That prospective juror was swiftly dismissed. But even more egregious cases have occurred. In 2009, some attorneys made the mistake of empaneling a “freelance writer” and “blogger” on an Illinois jury. She posted multiple, detailed accounts of what went on in the jury room during trial, such as:
But I can tell you some stuff. At one point on Friday, in the privacy of the jury room, one of the jurors said, “Well, all that's left now is deciding how much.” I looked at her in disbelief. ‘Lalalalalalala!’ I singsonged, holding my fingers in my ears. “You cannot talk that way, Juror L,” I said, “You have to wait until ALL the evidence is in and we've heard from ALL the witnesses.”
“How come?” she said, * * * ‘It's clear to me who's at fault.’
“You don't know that,” chimed in my buddy, Juror F. “What if they show us a suicide letter?”
“There's a suicide letter?”
“No, no, no!” we said in unison, and then JF continued, “but you don't know what else they might tell us or show us. You have to wait to make up your mind!” [3]
On review, an Illinois appellate court ultimately upheld the verdict, finding that – however weird and improper – the blog postings were not inherently prejudicial and did not demonstrate outside influence on the jury.
While you certainly don’t want a juror posting on social media, even if its of the “boring…get me outta here” variety, [4] this behavior is probably the least serious and most easily guarded against. You’re obviously going to investigate the social media profiles of your jurors and monitor them during the trial. While you can’t control what they say to their friends, if a juror starts throwing up commentary on TikTok, you’ll have the opportunity to bring it to the court’s attention in a way that doesn’t make it obvious who ratted them out.
A more serious issue is the second category of juror internet use – researching the facts or law of the case. How often does this occur? It is genuinely hard to know. Surveys of judges on how frequently they have detected juror research produce very low numbers, in the 5-10% range. [5] And while juror surveys suggest that a sizable percentage of jurors want to do internet research – in one survey nearly half – almost none are willing to admit to having done so. [6]
But weighing against this data is the intuition shared by many lawyers that the practice is widespread, even if it is almost impossible to detect. And there have been notable examples of jury deliberations going very awry because of outside research. For example, in a 2008 Oregon case, a judge dismissed a jury during deliberations after learning that jury members had been Googling terms such as “reasonable doubt,” “implied consent,” and “how accurate is a field sobriety test?” during deliberations. [7]
And the rise of AI tools could make this problem substantially worse. It’s not hard to imagine a juror throwing some “facts” into ChatGPT or some similar tool and asking the software how he or she is “supposed” to vote. Current the software appears hard coded not to provide helpful responses to those queries — “As an AI, I’m not allowed to tell you how to vote on a jury,,” but those restrictions tend not to be effective over time.
What can you do about this? You can request that jurors be instructed not to do internet research, but realistically that’s going to happen anyway and may not be a sufficient deterrent. More severe instructions are possible. Some courts have informed jurors that they may be personally punished for breaking the rules or requested that jurors rat each other out. But there is a practical ceiling on how much juror misbehavior can be eliminated through instructions.
Given this, one thing that you should consider is looking at what the jurors will see if they Google the folks in the case or throw the dispute into ChatGPT. If the answers are bad or confusing, see if there is a way to pre-empt or address them during the trial.
This may seem like overkill. If you’ve won a great in limine result, you may be reluctant to spoil it by introducing the bad facts yourself. But if the bad facts are the top Google hit for your client, you’ve got to consider the possibility that the jury will know them when they show up on day two of trial.
The last category of juror internet use is potentially the worst – using the internet to contact folks in the case. In principle, this doesn’t require the internet. We’ve written before about jurors asking witnesses on dates. But the ease with which social networking allows jurors to reach out to attorneys, clients, or witnesses poses its own problems.
The difficulty here is what precisely to do about juror contact. If a juror tries to DM your client or adds them on a social networking service, you are obligated to report this contact to the court. But this will certainly result in the juror being admonished by the judge and feeling embarrassed or betrayed by your side. You could seek to have the juror excused, but the fact that they’re reaching out to you means that you might not want them excused or be worried that the jury will be less sympathetic if they’re gone. And you can seek a mistrial, but you might not get it. Even if you do, it’s hardly a good result, given the wasted time and expense of two trials.
There’s no simple answer here. While reporting is obligatory, the relief that you seek is ultimately a judgement call depending on everything you know about the juror and how the case is proceeding.
These issues aren’t going anywhere and are likely to become increasingly common as a generation raised on smartphones and generative AI increasing fills out the jury venire. But by keeping the prospect of juror internet use in mind, you can try to mitigate the potential harms to your side at trial.
[1] Marcy Zora, The Real Social Network: How Jurors Use of Social Media and Smart Phones Affects a Defendant’s Sixth Amendment Rights, 2012 U.Ill. L. Rev. 577, 586 (2012).
[2] Id. at 578.
[3] Eskew v. Burlington N. & Santa Fe Ry. Co., 958 N.E.2d 426, 444–45 (Ill. App. 2011).
[4] See United States v. Ganias, Case No. 08-CR-224, 2011 WL 4738684, at *3 (D. Conn.
Oct. 5, 2011).
[5] John P. Gismondi, Bursting the Jury Bubble: The Internet’s Threat to Jury Impartiality and How Courts Should Respond, 96 Pa. B.A. Q. 24, 30-31 (Jan 2025).
[6] Id.
[7] See https://www.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2008/01/juries_raise_a_digital_ruckus.html
