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Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Law - May jurors text-message each other? And how does this relate to the Roberts hearings?

An ILB entry yesterday reported on the Colorado Supreme Court's decision on the question of "whether every message produced on government-owned equipment is open to public scrutiny, even if the subject is intimate."

Today the Chicago Tribune reports: "Judge won't remove 2 who text-messaged in botched arrest case." Some quotes:

Two jurors who admitted text-messaging each other will be allowed to continue serving in the civil trial in which a family is suing Chicago police over an 8-year-old boy's arrest for murder, a civil court judge ruled Monday.

Judge Randye Kogan reaffirmed her ruling of last Thursday that the male and female jurors could remain on the panel in the wrongful arrest suit stemming from a police investigation into the 1998 slaying of 11-year-old Ryan Harris.

Kogan's latest ruling came after an anonymous letter last week singled them out for allegedly using their cellular phones to text-message each other. Last week she decided to keep the two on the jury while Cook County sheriff's investigators scoured their cell phones to ensure they did not discuss the case.

Kogan noted Monday for the record that the city disagreed with her rulings and offered the city a chance to file a written brief objecting to the decision.

Michael Sheehan, a lawyer for the city, said the city believes the jurors should be removed, but attorneys are looking into the law before deciding whether to issue a written brief. Monday's court hearing was markedly tamer than Friday's, when the city's request to have Kogan reconsider her decision resulted in a lawyer from each side briefly thrown out of court.

Neither e-mails nor text-messaging existed when Justice Rehnquist was confirmed as Chief Justice in 1986, or even when Justice Breyer was confirmed eleven years ago. New technology creates new legal issues. That is the point of a NY Times Magazine article published August 28, 2005, titled "Roberts v. the Future." To quote George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen:
Since Roberts's nomination to replace Sandra Day O'Connor was announced in July, Senate staff members have been combing through legal memos that Roberts wrote, many while he was still in his 20's, hoping to find hints of his views about the most controversial issues of the past generation -- from civil rights to affirmative action to abortion. It's not surprising that lawyers, who are trained to look backward, instinctively deferring to precedent and tradition, would parse memos from two decades ago as clues to how Roberts would perform on the court.

But in the case of Supreme Court nominees, looking backward may not be the most reliable way to predict the future. * * *

That would represent a missed opportunity: in the next 10 or 15 years, as technology and science continue to advance and America's demographic profile continues to change, the Supreme Court will, in all likelihood, be asked to decide a fascinating array of divisive issues that are now only dimly on the horizon. To try to identify more concretely what those issues might be, I recently canvassed a number of technology experts, bioethicists and legal scholars.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 13, 2005 06:12 AM
Posted to General Law Related