The answer to that question may depend on where you are located. If you find yourself in Missouri, you might have a duty to investigage (run a brief search) your jury pool at least according to a recent Missouri Supreme Court decision, Johnson v. McCullough. This case arose out of a medical malpractice lawsuit brought against Dr. McCullough. During voir dire, counsel for the plaintiff asked the jurors if "anyone [had] ever been a plaintiff or a defendant in a lawsuit before." Numerous members of the panel answered affirmatively, however, one venire member (Mims) did not respond.
After a verdict in defendant's favor, plaintiff's counsel investigated Mims' civil litigation history using Missouri's automated case record service (Case.net) and discovered that Mims had been a defendant in multiple debt collection cases and in a personal injury case. Plaintiff's counsel filed a motion for new trial alleging Mims intentionally failed to disclose her prior litigation experience when asked about it during voir dire. A mistrial was granted and defendant appealed.
The Missouri Supreme Court upheld the mistrial verdict but also added some interesting language about the responsibility of attorneys to learn information about jurors in future cases. Specifically the court said:
In light of advances in technology allowing greater access to information...it is appropriate to place a greater burden on the parties to bring such matters to the court's attention at an earlier stage. Litigants should not be allowed to wait until a verdict has been rendered to perform a Case.net search for jurors' prior litigation history when, in many instances, the search also could have been done in the final stages of jury selection or after the jury was selected but prior to the jury being empanelled...Until a Supreme Court rule can be promulgated to provide specific direction, to preserve the issue of a juror's non-disclosure, a party must use reasonable efforts to examine the litigation history on Case.net of those jurors selected but not empanelled and present to the trial court any relevant information prior to trial.
While I understand the rationale behind this language (to prevent sandbagging by attorneys), I am not sure if the justices thought out the implications. First, the logical extension of this language is that any potentially disqualifying information discovered about a juror whether found in Case.net, Google or some other search engine must be turned over to the trial court. Second, what information specifically must be "present[ed] to the trial court"? What if an attorney discovers that a juror has been less than honest about an inconsequential fact? Must that be turned over to the court? Does this rule also apply to criminal cases where juror information is generally not discoverable?
h/tip to Susie Macpherson.
This case has also been previously examined by LaywersUSA.
Comments