- #Judge tina gartley luzerne county corrupt jydge how to#
- #Judge tina gartley luzerne county corrupt jydge trial#
But as more abuses surface, he said, judges may become more willing “to bring the hammer down.Read the judicial conduct rules. “It’s a Catch-22 for judges,” said Thaddeus Hoffmeister, an assistant professor at the University of Dayton School of Law, who blogs about juries. But penalties could also increase resistance to serving on juries. On the one hand, penalizing jurors for violating prohibitions against Internet use could have a strong deterrent effect.
#Judge tina gartley luzerne county corrupt jydge how to#
Jury experts say that the issue of how to punish jurors who venture online is increasingly posing a dilemma for courts. The judge found that the research was not sufficiently prejudicial to the case, which involved illegal cock-fighting. District Court judge in South Carolina decided against charging a juror with contempt after he looked up the definitions of “exhibit” and “sponsor” on Wikipedia and brought printouts of his findings to the jury room.
#Judge tina gartley luzerne county corrupt jydge trial#
(While that trial for resisting arrest was still going on, the juror had posted on her Facebook page: “Gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re GUILTY.”) In May, a Circuit Court judge in Michigan fined a juror $250 and ordered her to write a five-page essay about the constitutional right to a fair trial. In February, a Superior Court judge in Georgia fined a juror $500 for Googling information about a rape case. When judges do penalize jurors for Internet misconduct, they almost always opt for fines.
Data compiled by Reuters Legal found that more than 90 trials have been the subject of requests for a mistrial because of Internet-related juror misconduct more than half of those occurred in the last two years.Ĭriminal sanctions against jurors are rare. But many jurors are ignoring those instructions. In the last 18 months, at least eight state courts and the federal court system have rewritten civil and criminal jury instructions to bar jurors from tweeting, texting, blogging, emailing, or researching proceedings online. Judge Gartley, reached by phone, declined to comment.Ĭourts nationwide are struggling with how to prevent jurors from going online during trials. “She just wanted to be the best juror possible,” Bufalino said. Bufalino told Reuters Legal that Black misunderstood the judge’s instruction not to conduct outside research, believing she was referring only to facts in the case, not related issues such as how a person could suffer retinal detachment. Judge Gartley assigned a court-appointed attorney, Mark Bufalino, to represent Black in the contempt investigation. Prosecutors plan to review trial transcripts and interview the 11 other jurors before deciding whether to file a contempt charge, Vough said. Black’s online research looked at retinal detachment, another injury suffered by the young victim. The baby died from a fractured skull and brain injuries as a result of severe shaking by Cherry, prosecutors alleged. The defendant, Lamont Cherry, stands accused of the May 2009 death of his girlfriend’s daughter, one-year-old Zalayia McCloe. The facts of the case are particularly grisly. Early in the trial, he said, she raised her hand and asked the judge if she could question a prosecution witness. Vough said that Black, a local high school librarian, had already shown she was an especially eager juror. According to Vough, Judge Gartley had explicitly and repeatedly warned jurors before court recesses not to conduct their own research, including on the Internet.
Luzerne County Assistant District Attorney Michael Vough told Reuters Legal that he was considering a criminal contempt charge against Black.
0 kommentar(er)
