The Arkansas state Supreme Court has reversed a lower court’s decision that the juror’s tweets in question do not constitute grounds for a new trial. The Supreme Court is suggesting that Erickson Dimas-Martinez be given a brand new trial because Juror #2 decided to post Christian metalcore lyrics on Twitter.

The allegation of juror misconduct related to the juror tweeting during the trial was also raised in a motion for new trial but denied by the circuit court. The State counters that Appellant did not preserve an objection to the sleeping juror and cannot demonstrate prejudice with regard to the twittering juror as the juror never tweeted specifics about the case. Because we conclude that the one juror sleeping and a second juror tweeting constituted juror misconduct, we reverse and remand for a new trial.

As you can see above, the tweeting juror was not the only problem with the trial. There was also allegations that one juror was sleeping through jury deliberations. While this is an obvious no-no, the Twitter activity raises interesting new questions for our legal system.

Mainly, what does social media mean for “public discussion?” What are those involved in a trial allowed to express via social media? According to this Supreme Court, pretty much next to nothing.

According to the Supreme Court decision, Juror #2 tweeted this during the noon recess on the day evidence was submitted in the sentencing phase:

Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken. We each define the great line.

When asked about the nature of the tweet, Juror #2 explained that it was part of an album title from the Christian metalcore band Underoath.

Other tweets made during the trial process included “the coffee here sucks,” and “Court. Day 5. here we go again.” During the actual jury deliberations in the sentencing phase, he also tweeted “It’s over,” nearly an hour before the jury had officially announced their sentence recommendations.

Although the lower court found that the tweets were not a “material breach of the instruction or of his oath,” (the jury was instructed to refrain from electronic communications about the trial) the Supreme Court decided that the tweets were far from innocuous.

Because of the very nature of Twitter as an on online social media site, Juror 2’s tweets about the trial were very much public discussions. Even if such discussions were one-sided, it is in no way appropriate for a juror to state musings, thoughts, or other information about a case in such a public fashion.

And so Erickson Dimas-Martinez, who was convicted of murdering a teenager after a party in 2010, is off death row and awaiting a new trial – mostly because one guy couldn’t stay off Twitter for a few days.

Do you agree that tweeting and posting to Facebook amounts to public discussions of court proceedings, and should therefore be grounds for a mistrial? Let us know in the comments.

Arkansas

And he has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter

The jury was made up of seven men and five women, and according to a report from CBS Los Angeles, and the ethnic breakdown looked like this: 5 Hispanic, 6 white and 1 black. Deliberation began on Friday, where the jury worked for six hours. This morning, they reached a verdict after only 2 days of deliberation, about 8 1/2 hours total.

The case rested on the prosecution’s assertion that Dr. Murray had administered a powerful (and ultimately fatal) dose of propofol to Jackson in order to treat insomnia – but the dose was so high that it amounted to criminal negligence. The prosecution called the evidence “overwhelming.”

The defense argued that Jackson gave himself the deadly dose of medication, when the doctor was not present. They also argued that the incredibly public nature of the deceased had led to a criminal trial that should have never happened.

“If it were anybody else but Michael Jackson, would this doctor be here today?” defense attorney Chernoff asked, saying it’s a negligence case that should instead be heard by the state medical board.

Twitter is reacting strongly to the news:

Dr. Murray faces up to 4 years in prison and the loss of his medical license.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Warren Jeffs was given life in prison for his role in the assault of two young girls who he took as “wives.” The prosecutor said that Jeffs had “corrupted and perverted” his position as an authority in his religious organization in order to “satisfy his own appetites and desires.”

Jeffs, 55, was given life for engaging in sexual intercourse with a 12-year-old girl that he claimed as one of his wives. This conviction was obtained largely due to an audio recording of the supposed encounter.

He was given 20 years for the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl that the took as one of his wives. The prosecution submitted DNA evidence that proved Jeffs as the father of one of her children. He will serve the sentences consecutively.

Jeffs, who became the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (not affiliated with the mainstream LDS church, or Mormons) when his father died in 2002. Some estimates put his total number of wives at 78-80, with over 20 of them under the age of 17.

As you might expect, Twitter is all a-flutter about the news. And as you probably also expect, the comedians are out in full force –

The most popular joke is the polygamy/prison joke, with its many variations –

Some Twitter users are against those types of jokes, however –

Humor is cathartic. It’s how many people deal with serious issues. Warren Jeffs did some messed up stuff, that’s for sure. Is it alright to make light of his conviction? Did he get what he deserved? Let us know in the comments.

[Image Courtesy CNN]

Today, the judge presiding over his perjury trial declared a mistrial, based on rookie mistakes by the prosecution team.

U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton stopped the prosecution right in the middle of a video that they were showing the jury. That video, of Clemens’ 2008 testimony before congress, contained the mention of a piece of evidence that Walton had previous ruled inadmissible.

Friend and former NY Yankee teammate Andy Pettitte went on record and said that Clemens told him about his steroid use back in 1999. Although Clemens denied that claim, Pettitte says that he told his wife, Laura, about the admission.

Judge Walton previously disallowed prosecutors the chance to bring Laura Pettitte in to testify in the current trial, saying that he didn’t want her to testify because she hadn’t actually spoken with Clemens herself.

That video that the Judge stopped today of Clemen’s 2008 congressional hearing included a mention of Laura Pettitte’s statements by Representative Elijah Cummings.

This did not fly with Judge Walton. He said that didn’t know how to “un-ring the bell.”

“I think that a first-year law student would know that you can’t bolster the credibility of one witness with clearly inadmissible evidence,” Walton said.

Ouch.

The Judge went on to say that he “can’t in good faith leave this case where a man’s liberty is at risk.”

The interwebs are not as concerned with procedure. Although I don’t see the vitriolic response associated with another recent trial outcome, it’s still disgruntled. Here’s some Twitter response -

The hearing to decide on whether a new trial will be held will occur on September 2nd

At about 10 p.m. yesterday evening, Google+ engineering director Dave Besbris posted an announcement to his Google+ account. He said that they would be opening up invites again for an undisclosed amount of time.

He warned that they will continue to throttle invites, so not everyone that gets an invitation will be let into the field trial -

Things are going well with the systems right now so we feel comfortable enough to open up invites for a brief period. Our goal is to double the user base in the field trial. (Sorry, we’re not giving details about how many folks are in the field trial yet).

So, in a few minutes, we’ll open up invites again.

We continue to throttle invites, so please don’t mass invite folks as it won’t work. If you invite a handful of your most important friends and family you’re much more likely to get these folks into our system.

Thanks again for providing so much wonderful feedback!

I did not see this post, but nevertheless I was granted access to Google+ during this time period. I was allowed in directly through the plus.google.com site. When I was done completing my profile and was taken to the home page, there appeared an icon on the bottom right of the screen that allowed me to invite some friends to Google+. Adria Richards at ButYoureAGirl has a screencap of this -

She reports that of the 25 invitations she sent out, 6 reported that they had been let into the social network. I had a similar success rate – about 6 invitations and 1 success.

This invitation icon is now gone, and has been since the wee hours of the morning. Some report that the “brief” window lasted only about an hour.

Why is Google turning the switch on and off so much? In Dave Besbris’ post, he gives this explanation -

As I bet you’ve noticed, we are facing pretty incredible demand for Google+ invites.

As Engineering Director of Google+, I wanted to take a moment to explain why we’re growing the system slowly. First, we want to make sure our infrastructure scales so the service remains fast and reliable. Second, we want to ensure that bugs are fixed while there are still a relatively few people in the field trial.

It seems to be running fine to me. And Google has succeeded in creating massive buzz for their new product. They might not want to take it too far and truly annoy people to the point of disinterest.

Could that happen? Does Google need to start letting more people in? Or are they right to limit the field trial and wait until it is perfect to invite the masses? Let us know what you think.

The jury of 7 women and 5 men returned with not guilty verdicts for all the most serious charges of first-degree murder, child abuse and manslaughter of a child. The jury did find Anthony guilty of four counts of providing false information to a law enforcement officer.

Those counts are all misdemeanors.

To say that the verdict is shocking is an understatement. Most would agree that her fate had been sealed by the incredibly short deliberations by the jury. Common knowledge dictates that a quick verdict in a case like this usually means guilty.

But the jury felt that the prosecution failed to prove their case on the most serious charges, and Casey Anthony will presumably go free. Her sentencing will take place Thursday morning, but she isn’t expected to serve much more jail time if any for the 4 lesser convictions. Author and lawyer Jeffery Toobin said on CNN earlier that he would be shocked if Casey Anthony is forced to serve any jail time.

As you would expect, Twitter has erupted in a way I haven’t personally seen since Michael Jackson died. Almost every trending topic is related to the Casey Anthony decision. I think the funniest trend is “Law Abiding Citizen,” which from what I can tell is tending due to a quote from the film – “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove in court.” Sure seems to apply here. Check out these trending topic boxes –

This tweet perfectly describes 99.9% of the Twitter reaction so far –

Some Twitter users are tweeting about the burden of proof, however –

Then, we have the funnies (and man are there a lot of jokes to be made) -

Of course, amidst all the joking, it’s easy to lose sight of one part of this whole circus –

This is the second crack that prosecutors have had to take down the former Governor. In the original trial, the jury was unable to reach a verdict and came back hung after two weeks of deliberation. In that case, Blagojevich was hit with 24 counts which ranged from wire fraud to extortion to bribe solicitation. The jury was only able to agree on one count – lying to the FBI.

So prosecutors decided to go at him again, this time simplifying the charges. They did this by dropping some racketeering charges and leaving Blagojevich’s one time co-defendant, his brother, out of the whole thing.

They also took only 3 weeks to present their case. The first trial took over a month and a half. According to the AP, they just streamlined the whole thing – called fewer witnesses and played shorter clips from the damning audio evidence from the FBI wiretaps. Basically, anything to make the decision for the jury less complicated.

And at the retrial, Blag himself testified in his own defense. “When I hear myself saying that on tape, I’m an effin’ jerk, and I apologize,” he said on the stand.

This time, Blago has been convicted of 17 of the 20 counts. The jury was unable to come to a verdict on 2 counts. He faces up to 350 years in prison.

Blagojevich had turned himself into a somewhat unwanted celebrity after his removal from office. He made the talk show rounds immediately following his indictment, hitting The Late Show with David Letterman, The Daily Show and others. He tried to appear on the short-lived NBC reality show I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here, but the judge in his case wouldn’t let him leave the country to film it. His wife took his place on the show.

He also appeared on the 9th season of Celebrity Apprentice. He didn’t last very long, as Trump fired him during the 4th aired episode.

Blagojevich hasn’t always been an avid Twitter user, but he joined the network about a month or so ago. He then publicly announced that he would be live-tweeting his retrial. The judge in his trial quickly nipped that idea, as he banned Blago from using the social media client inside the courtroom.

The Twitterverse is reacting to the breaking news, most of which are not too sympathetic to the ex-Governor –

Ol’ Rod still has some supporters out there, however –

If you sought something through search and found a document stamped with that date, you might think your search engine of choice developed time travel. Modern technology and effort made the Old Bailey Online site possible.

As Resource Shelf noted, nearly 200,000 cases have been indexed and archived for visitors to the website. It’s a remarkable achievement:

Professor Robert Shoemaker, head of the Department of History at the University of Sheffield, and co-director of the project, said: “It is now possible to search records of 197,745 individual trials, running to 110,000 pages of text and some 120 million words.”

“Up until now this treasure trove of social, legal and family history has only been available to a few dedicated historians who were prepared to spend months peering at microfilm.”

One entry from the earliest day we could find for the records, April 29, 1674, showed Old Bailey lived up to its reputation as The Hanging Court. “There was another had Judgment to be hanged for Robbing one Thomas Feild in the Kings High-way near Enfield , and taking from him 4 pound [Text unreadable in original.] Shillings,” it reads.

Theft and burglary seemed rife in Jolly Olde England. Punishment existed in equal measure; instead of a revolving door jail system, the only revolving was done by the cooling corpse of the hanging prisoner, at the end of its noose.

To our amazement, we found something in the earliest Ordinary Account we could locate that looked almost modern. At the end of the Account after the condemned are hanged, there are advertisements, one of which comes from a doctor claiming a deafness cure.

Sounds almost like something you’d see in spam, doesn’t it?