The National Law Journal reports:

Jury misconduct didn’t start with Twitter, but reports of jurors behaving badly via social media are on the rise. In a new study, two Illinois judges urged their colleagues to tackle the social media problem head-on in jury instructions.

U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve of the Northern District of Illinois and Judge Charles Burns, in the criminal division of the Cook County, Ill., Circuit Court, surveyed hundreds of jurors in their respective courts during the past three years. They asked jurors about their temptation to communicate about a case through social networks while serving.

Most jurors said they didn’t feel tempted, with many citing the presiding judge’s social media-specific instructions. St. Eve and Burns, along with co-author and Jones Day associate Michael Zuckerman, said the survey showed that generalized instructions that didn’t explicitly discuss social media were insufficient.

St. Eve began surveying jurors in 2011. Along with Zuckerman, a former clerk, she published her initial results in 2012, analyzing 140 responses from an informal survey of federal jurors in her court.

St. Eve said in an interview that when the first study came out, other judges told her it was useful to have numbers quantifying the problem and asked how to adjust their jury instructions. “And some who aren’t, let’s say, familiar with the technology or keeping up with it found it helpful,” she added.

In the updated study, published in late February in Duke Law & Technology Review, St. Eve and her co-authors surveyed an additional 443 jurors in federal and state courts in Illinois.

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