Gwen Florio | Billings Gazette | 19 December 2010
A funny thing happened on the way to a trial in Missoula County District Court last week.
Jurors – well, potential jurors – staged a revolt.
They took the law into their own hands, as it were, and made it clear they weren’t about to convict anybody for having a couple of buds of marijuana. Never mind that the defendant in question also faced a felony charge of criminal distribution of dangerous drugs.
The tiny amount of marijuana police found while searching Touray Cornell’s home on April 23 became a huge issue for some members of the jury panel.
No, they said, one after the other. No way would they convict somebody for having a 16th of an ounce.
In fact, one juror wondered why the county was wasting time and money prosecuting the case at all, said a flummoxed Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew Paul.
District Judge Dusty Deschamps took a quick poll as to who might agree. Of the 27 potential jurors before him, maybe five raised their hands. A couple of others had already been excused because of their philosophical objections.
“I thought, ‘Geez, I don’t know if we can seat a jury,’ ” said Deschamps, who called a recess.
And he didn’t.
During the recess, Paul and defense attorney Martin Elison worked out a plea agreement. That was on Thursday.
On Friday, Cornell entered an Alford plea, in which he didn’t admit guilt. He briefly held his infant daughter in his manacled hands, and walked smiling out of the courtroom.
“Public opinion, as revealed by the reaction of a substantial portion of the members of the jury called to try the charges on Dec. 16, 2010, is not supportive of the state’s marijuana law and appeared to prevent any conviction from being obtained simply because an unbiased jury did not appear available under any circumstances,” according to the plea memorandum filed by his attorney.
“A mutiny,” said Paul.
“Bizarre,” the defense attorney called it.
In his nearly 30 years as a prosecutor and judge, Deschamps said he’s never seen anything like it.
David Mallard | New Matilda | 3 December 2010
Short attention spans and shonky research: some commentators worry that the internet threatens the jury system. David Mallard weighs up the evidence
People tend to enjoy the benefits of technology. Advances in computing and the internet have transformed our access to information and our ability to communicate and collaborate. But it seems people also tend to have concerns about how technology transforms the ways we think, behave and interact. What’s more, these concerns feed predictions that some of our long-standing societal institutions are in grave danger. But could these predictions sometimes serve to mask the underlying flaws in those institutions?
Take, for example, a recent lecture delivered by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge (yes, really). Lord Judge warned that "if the jury system is to survive as the system for a fair trial in which we all believe and support, the misuse of the internet by jurors must stop." His warning was triggered by cases in which it has been discovered that jurors used the internet to gather information about a case.
Lord Judge also raised concerns that jurors’ ability to listen attentively during a trial may be compromised because children now learn by "absorbing information from machines", and that the unregulated nature of social media such as Twitter might prejudice jurors — either through inaccurate information being tweeted from within the courtroom, or from advocates sending messages from without. But are these sorts of existential threat to the jury system really so unprecedented?
