Jury Instructions for the Modern Age a newspaper in the jury room, and had announced at the start of deliberations that she had already made her decision, and held up a piece of paper with her decision. While the juror in question denied doing research on the Internet and said that she had seen only a headline about the case in the newspaper, four jurors confirmed that the juror said either that she had done research online or knew where such research could be done online. But only one of these jurors recalled the emotional juror mentioning anything she found in that research; the juror said that she had mentioned the possible sentence for the original murder charges in the case. The trial court replaced that juror in question with an alternate, based on the juror’s failure to admit her apparent violation of the court’s instructions. But he denied a mistrial, holding that the remaining jurors were not tainted. The appeals court disagreed with this assessment, concluding that “juror 14’s misconduct tainted the jury as a whole.”311 As this article went to press, a judge declared a mistrial after jurors deliberating in a criminal case accusing a pastor of sexual assault of a teenage girl in his congregation reported to the court that one juror had handed out the results of his Wikipedia research on the definition of a legal term. The jury had been repeatedly admonished not to do online research.312
New Mexico – Civil: Modern; Criminal: Modern Civil Instructions New Mexico’s civil instruction on juror conduct was amended in 2011 to admonish jurors not to do Internet research.313 After the changes, it reads as follows: Your job is to find and determine the facts in this case, which you must do solely upon the evidence received in court. There are a number of important rules governing your conduct during the trial. *** Fifth, do not consider anything you may have read or heard about the case outside the courtroom. During the trial and your deliberations, avoid news accounts of the trial, whether on radio, television, in the newspaper, on the internet or elsewhere. If you happen to see or hear any news account of the trial, please report that fact to a member of the staff. Sixth, do not attempt any research, tests, experiments, visits to any locations involved in this case, or other investigation, including on the internet. It would be difficult or impossible to duplicate conditions shown by the evidence; therefore, your results would not be reliable. Such conduct also runs contrary to the rule that your verdict must be based solely upon the evidence presented to you. Nonetheless, in your deliberations, you need not ignore your backgrounds, including professional, vocational, and educational experience. Seventh, because you are only to consider the evidence presented in the trial in this case, you may not use your computer or phone or other electronic device at any time to do any research on any issue arising in the trial or jury deliberations, or to comment on what is happening in the trial or jury deliberations. Specifically, you may not text-message or go to or use any social networking sites, including, but not limited to, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and/or YouTube. Don’t use internet dictionaries, Wikipedia, or any other source of information. You may rely only on the evidence presented in the trial in this case.314 311. New Jersey v. Scott, 2009 WL 2136273, 2009 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 1901 (N.J. Super., App. Div. July 20, 2009), certification certif. denied, 200 N.J. 504, 983 A.2d 1111 (N.J. Nov. 10, 2009) (table). 312. Kibret Markos, Mistrial declared in Mahwah pastor’s sex-assault case, The [Bergen County, N.J.] Record, July 7, 2011, http://www.northjersey.com/news/crime_courts/Mistrial_declared_in_pastors_sex-assault_case.html. 313. See N.M. Uniform Jury Instr. – Civ. [NMUJI – Civ.] 13-110 (2011) (as modified by 2011 N.M. Ct. Order 0011 [eff. March 25, 2011]), available at http://www.nmcompcomm.us/nmrules/ NMRules/13-110_1-19-2011.pdf. 314. NMUJI – Civ. 13-110 (2011) (as modified by 2011 N.M. Ct. Order 0011 [eff. March 25, 2011]), available Reynolds Courts & Media Law Journal
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