Last week the Arkansas Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the capital conviction of Erickson Dimas-Martinez. Mr. Dimas-Martinez was convicted of robbing and shooting a teenager after a party. Lawyers for Mr. Dimas-Martinez are trying to overturn his conviction based on a tweeting juror that the judge would not dismiss from the case. In arguing to maintain the verdict, the government states that the tweets in question were not about the deliberations but rather involved only the juror's feelings.
For more information on this story see below:
KHBS-KHOG: Lawyer: Murder Conviction Should Be Tossed Due To Tweets
Wall Street Journal Blog: Juror Tweets at Issue in Arkansas Murder Case
Arkansas News: Lawyer: Tweeting, sleeping by jurors cause to overturn murder ...
A similar issue has arisen in Illinois where the defendants in Eskew v. Burlington and Northern Santa Fe Railroad Company are appealing to the Illinois Supreme Court. This case arose from a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the widow of a blind man who was struck and killed by a train outside of Chicago. The defendants are attempting to reverse the $4.5 million verdict against them based on the fact that a juror made blog posts to her blog the Green Room during the trial.
I predict that those seeking to overturn their verdicts will face an uphill battle. At best, I think these appellants should hope for an evidentiary hearing allowing them to voir dire the jury about the blog posts. For the most part courts have been hesitant to overturn verdicts based on jurors who blog (see e.g., Goupil v. Cattell) absent a strong showing that: (1) the juror discussed details of the trial; (2) the juror demonstrated a pre-trial bias; (3) other jurors read the blog; (4) the posts revealed that the juror was considering facts not in evidence; or (5) a third party contacted the juror about her comments.
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