Bosses and online daters aren’t the only ones sniffing out your Facebook profile: some lawyers are “Facebook-ing the jury” as part of a background check in jury duty selection.
Amber Yearwood, a consultant from juror consultancy Trial Behavior Consulting in San Francisco, said she occassionally Googles prospective jurors to help her determine whether or not the person will help or harm her clients, who are mostly attorneys.
“Sites like Facebook and MySpace offer limited relevant information for the puposes of jury selection, but it does become useful when we have very limited information about the juror,” she says.
Best Microsoft MCTS Training – Microsoft MCITP Training at Certkingdom.com
But Yearwood said jury consultants also check online profiles when they’re given the luxury of time to do background checks. Typically she looks for case-specific attitudes; someone who makes public generalizations about insurance companies would probably not be selected by a defense attorney in an insurance fraud case, for example.
But the biggest general flag Yearwood looks for in profiles is a person who with a dominant, opinionated personality.
“If I see someone posting on a gazillion topics and giving advice to various Facebook friends, or going on long rants on things in the news, that tells me that the person is a leader,” Yearwood explains. “Each side looks for who their problem jurors are and what attributes they’ll have. ‘Leadership’ functions as a magnifier of how bad someone might be for you. Suddenly a borderline strike becomes a priority strike.”
For instance, last year Yearwood crossed out a potential juror from a product-liability case when the person’s Facebook profile made her sound highly opinionated. The prospective juror also doled out lots of unsolicited medical and sex advice.
“We were concerned she might lead the charge against us, so we struck her,” Yearwood said.
John Morris, general counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said he was neither surprised nor concerned that attorneys trawled Facebook to help them pick a jury.
“I’d be surprised if they had access to private profiles, but if an individual is putting up information that’s available to the public I don’t see any need for concern,” Morris said. He also noted that employers often do a Google search of prospective employees.
“This just highlights the broad lesson, probably more in the job search context than in the jury duty context—that every Internet user should know that if you have information you don’t want viewed by the public, don’t make it publicly available.”