
Judges 'giving up' trying to stop juries using Internet - AlexMuir
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/nov/19/law-jury-twitter-internet
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frou_dh
I've attended a few conferences lately, which have been the first
"lecture"-like settings I've been in since graduating in 2007. The extent to
which fellow attendees felt the need to constantly mess around on laptops and
smartphones during presentations was dismaying and struck me as rather
disrespectful. The conference organisers even seemed to encourage this by
bleating on about twitter hashtags whenever they got the chance, and having
live twitter searches full of vacuous banter distractingly projected as a peer
to the presenter's slides.

Honestly, I thought I had a problem with attention deficit, but maybe I ain't
seen nothing yet.

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jaysonelliot
I've always worried about the concept of jury trials anyway, to be honest. Why
would I prefer my fate to be decided by twelve random bozos off the street,
when there's a judge right there who is actually educated in the law, and
presumably bases their reputation on their capability to judge people fairly?

~~~
tzs
If there were no facts in dispute, and so all that we needed was for someone
to say what the law says the outcome is given the set of facts, then a judge
would be all you would need. Heck, you could skip the judge and just have law
students handle it.

The problem is that usually there are facts in dispute. Someone has to listen
to witnesses telling conflicting stories, and decide which are telling the
truth and which are not. That's what the jury is for.

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badwetter
Most of the media rules regarding trials etc., need to be rethought. Same as
many laws in my opinion. Laws need to be constanly updated now that our
societies move at a faster pace in terms of innovation.

