Trial by Media

One of the basic rights a defendant has is "the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury” as well as the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” (Zora, 2010). This is made possible by a complicated jury selection process that serves to find the best candidates for making an un-biased decision regarding someone’s life. In my essay I will look into how social media, and media in general, negatively impact court cases and decisions, and how the courts choose or attempt to deal with this issue. I will also consider the effect that media has on the lives of the parties outside the court room, and post trial. To highlight the effect that new forms of media have I will look into the differences between publicity in today’s trials and trials in the past.

Media plays a huge role in people’s lives, whether you are a teacher, a construction worker, a criminal, or for this papers case; a judge or juror. The role media plays is very diverse, ranging from advertisement of products to presentation of news and current events all the way to “entertainment”, I put that in quotations to emphasize that I’m borrowing the word from the dictionary of the media, whether I agree with everything the term is used for is subject to another paper.

Judges, lawyers and jurors are not there just to facilitate something that’s already planned or just to read out information, they each go through a separate process that deems them fit to do their job, and each is picked after meeting a set of standards. One of these standards, in the case of judges and jurors is that they cannot be bias towards any group of people, or be partial towards any party, they must be open minded, and while judges go through an extremely lengthy process and take years to get to their position, involving years of studying and years of practicing law, exposing them to a huge number of cases and forcing them to have as open a mind as possible. A juror is a random person who is likely not