If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts?
If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts?
I have old Facebook and Twitter accounts, maybe some others. I'm old so there's a MySpace account out there. But I've mostly been using reddit the last decade or so, and have migrated to Lemmy. Now, Lemmy is the only social media i use. Recent news got me thinking about this question.
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Legally, wouldn't you have to?
When you're answering the questionnaire, you're already sworn-in and under oath, so I would assume you'd legally have to. Not sure what the penalty would be, though, but I'm not really interested in finding out.
I guess they'd also have to prove it's yours, though. Still, even though I use a pseudo-anonymous name online, I don't post anything I wouldn't want my real name next to.
Edit: OTOH, you could probably refuse to answer which would likely get you dismissed. IANAL, though. The last time I was summoned for jury duty, they didn't ask about social media accounts or anything like that. Just a few questions that would have indicated whether I could be impartial.
That feels like a privacy issue, maybe related to the topic of whether or not they can force you to unlock your phone? I don't know where the current law is on that.
Yeah, that's why I added that bit at the bottom. You could probably safely decline to answer, but they'd likely dismiss you for that. Which, if you just want out of jury duty, may be a way to do it lol. Either way, you should definitely not lie and say "no".
I’m on the go, but I believe the mechanics for the most jurisdictions is that a refusal to answer would then be put to the judge as to if an answer must be compelled or not.
If you assert a right to silence for possible self-incrimination reasons, or if the question is very personal and the invasive nature outweighs the value of the question, a judge may rule against needing to answer. If the judge rules that you are compelled to answer, a continued refusal may lead to a contempt charge. That’s something of a worst case and I think it’s more likely the judge would dismisss as a practical matter. This would not cost the attorneys any of their freebie jury dismissals.
That means if you had for example highly biased social media history and were refusing to answer because you’re trying to sneak something past and get seated, it really doesn’t help you because you get dismissed by the judge and it doesn’t even cost the “opposing” attorney anything. If the judge rules that you don’t have to answer, the “opposing” attorney can still dismiss you because they got a bad vibe.
If you have biased social media history and you’re trying to get out of jury duty, if anything you’d want to talk about it as much as possible.
There are situations where responsiveness is compelled. If a judge rules that a question must be answered in voir dire, that’s a situation.
The solution, as it were, to compelled speech is that for example if you somehow are compelled into admitting to a crime, that speech couldn’t be criminally used against you. There has been at least one high profile case where compelled speech was used for a criminal conviction which we ended up being reversed.
Of course, a situation in jury selection where a question would lead to a 5th amendment issue and still be compelled seems very unlikely. More likely questions would simply be uncomfortable to answer. A judge has discretion to determine if a question is more invasive than useful. But something like social media posting related to the case seems like something most judges would allow.
Some comments in this thread are answering as if lawyers would be asking for the passwords or something. That’s not what’s happening.
From the thread comments, I believe OP is asking about giving up social media between the summons and the selection as a means to more likely end up on a jury.
Attorneys might ask about past social media use and you are supposed to tell the truth. I don’t feel comfortable with people scrubbing their social media history and then lying to the court about what may or may not have been on it, which is the undertone I’m getting in the thread.
In a higher profile case, bigger and more expensive attorney teams will probably spend more time and effort to snoop on prospective jurors, on lower profile cases attorneys will probably just ask jurors questions and look at their answer forms.