CLUELESS COLUMNIST WANTS JURORS EXPOSED

The clumsy argument she makes in her article would be comical if it wasn't so damn dangerous.  She is either inexcusably naive or unforgivably disingenuous.  You be the judge.

Now that the trial is over, we ought to know their names.

I'm not advocating that these women become targets of anger over their not guilty verdict - I think they made a sound decision based on the law.

And I'm not suggesting that the jurors be pressured to talk if they choose not to.

I am saying that judges have no business keeping juries anonymous once a trial is over.

Secrecy has no place in a court system founded on openness.

Probably no surprise coming from a newspaper columnist.

(Full disclosure: My employer, the Orlando Sentinel, is arguing in court for the jurors' names to be made public. The judge hasn't ruled.)

It's so generous of her to not advocate that the jurors become targets.  Wow.  But surely she knows that while a citizen does have a right to refuse to speak to reporters it doesn't do them much good when the reporters are camped outside the house, just waiting for the juror (or members of the juror's family) to come out and run the gauntlet.  Is she really that naive?  

Does she really think that a media feeding frenzy can be neutralized merely by refusing to cooperate with it?  If anything, the opposite is true.  The fact of the matter is that they will be pressured - relentlessly pressured - whether they encourage it or not.

She and her employer, the liberal Orlando Sentinel, have a self-serving interest in outing these jurors and it's legitimate to suspect that their interest is not merely for the sake of transparency.  She can claim that she agrees with the verdict but that's actually a bit weaselly.  

Most experts, including the ones who hate the verdict, understand that the prosecution's case simply did not meet it's burden of proof.  Agreeing with that assessment is one thing.  But there are obviously plenty of people who are furious about it.  Dangerously furious.  

There's no reason to assume that Kassab and her newspaper are interested in doing fluff pieces about the jurors.  They want to give the jurors the journalistic version of a TSA-style cavity search in order to satisfy the outrageously outrageous outrage of their liberal readers.  She continues:

But there are reasons why everyone should care about making sure juries aren't kept in the shadows.

Plain and simple: Secret juries undermine public confidence in the system.

The right to a jury trial is as fundamental as the other civil liberties also enshrined in the Constitution.

The Founding Fathers intentionally set up the jury system — panels of everyday people to judge guilt. What a stark contrast to the secretive Star Chamber courts that colonists left behind.

When juries aren't open to scrutiny, the American legal system is asking for trouble.

Whoaa! Say hello to Mr. Strawman!

First of all, it's not really a "secret" jury.  The court knows who they are.  Everybody who was allowed in the courtroom during proceedings saw them sitting there, day after day.  

Secondly, the jurors were "scrutinized" - by the court and by both the prosecutors and defense lawyers.  It's called voir dire: 

From French "to see to speak," the questioning of prospective jurors by a judge and attorneys in court. Voir dire is used to determine if any juror is biased and/or cannot deal with the issues fairly, or if there is cause not to allow a juror to serve (knowledge of the facts; acquaintanceship with parties, witnesses or attorneys; occupation which might lead to bias; prejudice against the death penalty; or previous experiences such as having been sued in a similar case).

And the jurors were not running the show, so nothing happened in that courtroom on their initiative except when they asked a question.  In other words, sequestering them did not grant them any special authority or influence over the proceedings.  It was their inconvenience, not ours.

Also, nobody is advocating that all trial juries be kept secret as a general rule.  The vast majority of them are not like this.  Clearly this case required special precautions.  Her argument would have some validity if there actually were people demanding that all juries be sequestered.  But they're not.

Then she tries to provide an example...big mistake!

Consider the case of John Gotti.

The Mafia leader was acquitted of racketeering by an anonymous jury in 1987.

Five years went by before it was discovered that one juror had Mafia connections and took a bribe to push for an acquittal.

Perhaps if the jury had not been anonymous, the truth about the rogue juror would have been discovered sooner - or the bribe wouldn't have happened at all because the risk of scrutiny would have been too great.

Actually, the point of keeping the jurors secret was not only to protect them from possible retaliation but also to shield them from attempts at bribery and/or intimidation prior to the trial.  As she points out, the precautions ultimately failed to keep one of the jurors from tanking the verdict.  He was a friend of a friend of a "friend of ours."  Go figure!  Is she really saying that had the media known who the jurors were that they could have prevented the fix?  Naive or disingenuous?

She goes on to explain that the need to protect the identities of jurors grew during the 1980s and early '90s due to serious threat of organized crime and ultra-violent drug cartels.  Her argument now, apparently, is that if that kind of threat doesn't exist then there's no legitimate reason to keep jurors anonymous.  She claims that the "media and the public" are being unfairly categorized as the new "bad guys."

Legal experts I talked with couldn't recall a single instance of a juror being hurt or threatened after a trial.

They might have to deal with knocks on the door by reporters, but they aren't compelled to talk - though some of them almost always do.

Just look at B37, who is making book deals and TV appearances while also enjoying her anonymity.

The ink was barely dry on Zimmerman's acquittal form when an agent announced B37 had a book deal (short-lived, it turns out). Then B37 appeared on CNN on Monday and Tuesday night, though only in a darkened silhouette that didn't show her face.

Naive or disingenuous?  She doesn't have any evidence regarding a juror being hurt or threatened after a trial.  Really?  Is that the new standard?  It seems to me that prior to February 2012 George Zimmerman had never killed anybody before.  And yet it happened.  It's funny how first-time things happen, even when they never happened before.  Liberal "logic" at work.

But, again, how magnanimous she is to concede that they might have to deal with people knocking on their door. How 20th Century.  Is she really not aware of the internet and social media?  Is she not aware that thanks to Google Maps any asshole can find a juror's house, including a street visual, and go there to do pretty much whatever they want? 

Given the emotional outcry, the threats of violence as well as actual violence and property damage we've seen since the verdict, does she really think that the public poses no threat? She finally confirms her snarky liberal bias when she mentions the juror who appeared on CNN and briefly had a book deal.  What she doesn't mention is how and why the book deal was ultimately scrubbed.  

It was a Twitter mob.  They were angry that the jury acquitted Zimmerman; angry about her appearing on CNN; angry about what she had to say and angry that she was going to "profit from the acquittal."  I'm pretty sure that such a book deal would have been offered whatever the final verdict.  So the book deal had nothing to do with the acquittal.  Not that it mattered to the mob.  

They didn't know the identity of the juror but they did know the identity of the literary agent who had made the offer.  So they applied pressure to her instead.  One can only imagine what kind of pressure they would have brought to bear on the juror herself if they could have.  As it was, the agent quickly surrendered and dumped the juror.  The juror herself also responded by saying that she would not pursue a book deal in the future.

But, of course, there's no chance that outing the jurors would subject them to mob action, either in person or via the media...right?