A British juror was sentenced Jan. 23 to six months imprisonment in the United Kingdom for researching a defendant's past on the Internet during deliberations--a problem that although still rare, has increasingly become a problem on both sides of the Atlantic.

The juror, identified by the BBC as Theodora Dallas, "deliberately disobeyed" a judge's instructions not to search the Internet, said Igor Judge, lord chief justice of England and Wales.  

According to the BBC, Dallas, who immigrated to the United Kingdom from Greece, said she only meant to search the Internet to check the meaning of "grievous bodily harm." When she added the name of her city, Luton, to the Internet search, she said she came across a newspaper report mentioning that the man under trial for assault had been previously acquitted of a rape charge. Then she told her fellow jurors about the acquittal.

A fall 2011 survey (.pdf) of 508 U.S. federal judges finds that the problem of jurors using mobile devices to access the Internet during trials isn't unknown here, either. The survey, conducted by Federal Judicial Center, the educations and research agency for the federal courts, found that 30 could report instances of detected social media use by jurors.

Three judges said a juror friended, or attempted to friend, one or more participants in the case, and three also report that a juror communicated (or attempted to do so) directly with participants in the case, the survey report says. Judges also said that Facebook was the most common social media form utilized by jurors, although one judge reported discovering a juror using MySpace.

In an incident reported after the survey was published, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered (.pdf) a new trial in December 2011 for a death row inmate after one juror was caught posting Twitter updates during an April 2010 trail. On the day of sentencing, the juror Tweeted "Choice to be made. Hearts to be broken. We each define the great line."

For more:
- download the fall 2011 survey of U.S. federal judges  on jurors' use of social media (.pdf)

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