Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.
Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, a waste of eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.
This is happening, because the world is no longer a 1 dimensional analog plane. It has an underruning current, an electronic river of information in which the human agents use to navigate their lives. We no longer need to “guestimate” or “assume” like our fathers did - we can just look it up online to get accurate data, background and multiple viewpoints on any given subject, and to to communicate with our peers asking for guidence. And we can do it from anywhere at any time.
This is clearly a problem for the legal system and they will need to adapt somehow. Cause this proble is not going to go away. It will only get worse.
