London’s High Court has approved the request of the Attorney General to bring criminal contempt charges against a juror alleged to have contacted a defendant in the case via Facebook.
According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, the juror is accused of having contacted one of the defendants in an already complicated drug-conspiracy trial. At the time the juror initiated the contact via Facebook, the defendant had been acquitted but the trial was not yet complete. The defendant allegedly asked the juror for details about the jury’s deliberations on the remaining defendants.
A new trial was ordered after reports of the juror’s conduct surfaced. The Attorney General contends that the juror also conducted her own internet research, despite having received repeated instructions from the court to not discuss the case with anyone other than fellow jurors. The entire fiasco is said to have cost more than 6 million pounds.
In all, there were no less than four trials–all for the same case. The first trial ended after the parties spent so much time arguing about certain confidential information that the judge ordered a new trial due to “juror fatigue”–concluding that the jurors could not be expected to remember the evidence they’d seen after having been delayed for so long.
The second trial ended when the parties exchanged documents containing the much-fought-over confidential information and, apparently, failed to properly redact the information. As a result, the information was revealed and the court ordered a new trial for the second time. Alas, another example of lawyers who don’t use proper redaction tools, such as those in Adobe Acrobat.
The third trial ended as a result of the alleged juror misconduct. The court ordered that a new jury had to be selected and a fourth trial had to take place–thus the astronomical costs to the parties and the judicial system. See the Bolton News for more details relating to the high costs of this case.
