Alaina Lancaster | Law.com
What’s Wrong With Virtual Jury Trials?
Jurors in some of the country’s first online trials faced tech issues and waning attention spans. But Cooley’s Litigation Chair Michael Attanasio says there are more problems with a virtual jury trial to be skeptical about.
Attanasio said one of the constitutional issues that remote jury trials could raise is that defendants didn’t get a jury of their peers, because every person must have a steady WiFi connection.
“You’re creating a class of jurors who happen to have secure internet connections and nice computers,” Cooley said. “I don’t think that’s very workable either. That’s a real issue. It’s not unlike the debate about how schools are being managed and conducted right now with these challenges and the difference between socioeconomic groups when it comes to remote learning. You would have the same thing with remote court, and that’s not how juries are supposed to be constructed.”
The San Diego partner said the trials could raise challenges based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Batson decision, which spoke to the principal that jury service is a right as a citizen.
“So you are taking the right to be a juror and you are excluding the class of people who don’t have computers and internet connections that would allow them to be in court on a screen for five or six hours a day,” he said. “That raises some real interesting issues.”
Keep an eye on your Legal Speak podcast feeds for the full interview with Attanasio to find out the Cooley litigation team’s quarantine ritual for staying sharp amid trial backlogs. Warning: You might not be able to “handle the truth.”