A Maryland appeals court has overturned a first-degree felony-murder conviction because a deliberating juror had conducted an online search of scientific terms related to how blood flows after death.

The juror’s Wikipedia search denied Allan Jake Clark a fair trial because “the right to an impartial jury embraces the right to have the case decided exclusively on the evidence that is produced in open court,” the Court of Special Appeals held in an unreported opinion.

According to the article, a juror looked up the terms “livor mortis” and “algor mortis” on Wikipedia and printed the pages out. The appeals court ruling was 3-0. The article goes on to say that, earlier this year in Wardlaw v. State, the appeals court threw out an assault conviction because a juror in the original trial looked up the term “oppositional defiant disorder.”

In this most recent case, the judge let the trial continue after the juror said he could put aside what he found in his online search.

Related posts:

1. Twitter allowed in the Courtroom…. for now

Phone-banking has always taken a lot of organizational efforts and resources in campaigns. You have to find a physical location to have your volunteers come in and make the calls. You have to actually find the volunteers. The list goes on and on. VoterFetch aims at removing the physical location and phone line barriers by allowing the volunteer to make the calls from home. There have been campaigns giving lists to volunteers to make calls at home, but I have yet to see anyone else doing what VoterFetch does in this area.

The FAQ for VoterFetch is a pretty good summary of current and future capabilities.

Volunteers log in to VoterFetch and download call lists that have been placed there by the campaign. As they make their calls, they log the results online and the campaign gets them in real time. There is also an offline mode that allows the results to be uploaded later.

Currently, their program is not set up to integrate VOIP systems, but they are exploring that as a possibility in the near future. Their pricing is based on the level of office your candidate is running for. They have demos available (see their website for more information.)

Other possible uses are mentioned in the FAQ. Additionally, VoterFetch can be integrated with CiviCRM and Salesforce. It can also be customized to match a campaign’s website. They also seem to be looking into developing an iPhone app. Please also note that they only work for Republicans.

The below video is from VoterFetch.com:

No related posts.

I want to extend a special welcome to readers who found this post via The Volokh Conspiracy. I also publish a blog on Baltimore news issues called Inside Charm City if you’d like to take a look.

Justin Fenton of the Baltimore Sun recently posted this on Twitter:

Live tweeting going on from inside Dixon courtroom: Follow @whelananddealin, @wbaltv_court, @FOXBaltimore until deputies snatch their phones

A query from Robbie Whelan of the Daily Record to Fenton after the above post:

why is everyone from The Sun so worked up about us losing our tweeters in the courtroom? Was there some sort of reprimand?

Fenton’s response to the question:

i’m not there, all i know is that i’ve been yelled at when i’ve had my phone out, and the deputies threaten to take it away

The above exchange and the subject of this post relate to the usage of Twitter by reporters in the Courthouse this week for the trial of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon.

According to a reporter covering the trial, there are signs banning cell phones from being used in the courtroom but apparently it’s not being applied to reporters who are using their silenced PDAs or smartphones to tweet from the trial.

There has been a lot of attention on the Twitter feeds listed above in Fenton’s tweet (Robbie Whelan of the Daily Record, WBAL-TV, and WBFF-TV) as well as the hashtag #dixontrial that has been promoted by people tweeting from inside and outside the courthouse. This has been going on since jury selection started. Additionally, WBAL-TV and WBAL-AM have been doing live updates via Live Wire.

Apparently, some internecine conflict is possibly brewing among reporters from the Baltimore Sun who aren’t tweeting and those from other media sources who are. The Fenton-Whelan exchange may be evidence of it [something Fenton strongly denies to us - his full reply is below.] Other evidence of some friction is the fact that Sun staffers have told reporters who are tweeting from the trial that Judge Sweeney is “pissed” about all the Twitter usage in the courtroom. One reporter even mentioned the Judge staring when reporters pull out their Blackberries.

I’ve heard the reason that staffers at the Sun aren’t getting in on the attention all of the Twitter updates at the trial under the impression that they aren’t allowed to tweet from the courtroom. In fact, I’ve heard Sun staffers even told people asking why they weren’t tweeting that there was a ban on the use of Twitter in the courtroom. The Sun staffers either believe there really is a ban [information that has since come to light indicates this to be the truth] or the Sun itself has some sort of restriction on its reporters from tweeting inside the courtroom. The lack of tweets from Sun reporters covering the trial has shown one of those two things to be the case. Their tweets mostly consist of updates from outside during breaks or before/after proceedings along with retweets of the people who are actually posting updates inside.

[An update at the bottom of this post indicates that there is indeed a rule against usage of PDAs in the courtroom but that it and other rules are not being enforced.]

I have talked to no one who has heard an admonition from the bench at any point about the use of Twitter. While nobody can be in the courtroom for every single second of the proceedings, you would think at least one of the people tweeting would have been there to hear it or the Judge would have notified their bosses in a more direct manner.

More than one person I’ve discussed this with has mentioned that the Sun is really dropping the ball on trial coverage. I would tend to agree. If everyone else is indeed doing it and not being stopped, there is going to be the perception that the Sun just didn’t use all their online resources for some unknown reason. As the trial moves forward, we may see something happen on the Twitter front or we may have to wait until the Mayor’s next trial on perjury charges later this year.

It is a new frontier for courtroom reporting with modern technology. Cellphones have been an issue for years now, with most jurisdictions cracking down heavily on people whose phones ring in the courtroom. I was considering hanging around Courthouse East for at least one day of the trial but figured that I wouldn’t be allowed to tweet via my Blackberry in the courtroom and I prefer liveblogging to tweeting from live events anyway. With those expectations, I decided to not even try to go.

I remember when tweeting started last week there was even an impression by some of a ban on tweeting and everyone assumed all of the tweeting was going to take place in the hallways or outside. As it became evident updates were being posted from inside the courtroom, there was never an update about any restrictions or regulations on the practice. If I were covering the trial as a member of the media under the circumstances detailed above, I would probably be tweeting. Until someone gets told not to, I expect the tweeting to continue and I also expect everyone to stop pretty quickly if the Judge gives the order.

If you want to follow the updates from Twitter feeds covering the trial (including those who aren’t using the #dixontrial hashtag), I have a post up at Inside Charm City with the updates.

IMPORTANT UPDATE
Since posting this I received a link to the media protocol put out for this trial. Item 13 relates to the use of phones in the courthouse and it is reportedly being ignored completely in the press aisles. I’ve also heard that Item 17 on the rules bans food and drink but that people who can’t do without their Starbucks have it with them in the courtroom every morning. I’m trying to get the link to work or get a copy of the file that loads faster.

As far as this goes, the Baltimore Sun is indeed following proper protocol. It just seems odd that the Judge has so little control over his courtroom that he hasn’t cracked down on it yet. Maybe he doesn’t want negative media attention.

Update 2: One thing I didn’t think about. The protocols specifically refer to 100 feet of Courtroom 230. Is that where the trial is still ongoing? The jury selection was moved to another courtroom due to heat issues in the original courtroom that resulted in the collapse of an alternate juror. This means little or nothing in my opinion, but some legal person might look at it with a little more scrutiny.

Update 3
I received the following email from Justin Fenton of the Sun:

Just dropping a friendly note; kinda bewildered how my exchange with Rob Whelan was taken out of context as evidence of some sort of Twitter feud. I am not covering the trial but was enjoying Whelan’s tweets and decided to point some of my followers to them. With our social networking push, we routinely link to other news sources and blogs, so there’s nothing new there. Because I’ve had deputies threaten me over phone use in a courtroom, I made a joke about “follow them till their phones are snatched.” But at the end of the day, I’ve got nothing to do with coverage of this news event, so please don’t tie what I said into any evidence of a “feud” or “internecine conflict.”

I’ve gone back and added content inside brackets in the original post that indicates Fenton denies our original sentence that the exchange between him and Whelan “may be evidence” of some sort of feud over Twitter among reporters at the Courthouse. As Fenton says above, he isn’t covering the trial. I went back and bolded the word “may” that was originally in there to emphasize I didn’t say that it was definite proof. The exchange of tweets happened at the time I was writing this post originally and was going back through a lot of other stuff related to this topic on Twitter Search and other places so I may not have quite gotten the context Fenton meant for his tweets.

Fenton’s original tweet posted above didn’t raise much of an alarm to me, but Whelan’s response asking about everyone from the Sun being worked up over the matter did catch my eye. This information matched everything else I’d been told from other sources today about the reaction inside the courtroom from reporters with the Sun. Fenton hasn’t been there and that definitely rules him out. Taking him at his word that he was just joking around removes his tweets from from evidence of an internecine feud, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t any animosity between reporters from different media outlets over the Twitter issue at trial.

One last update: The Baltimore Sun has now created a Twitter list with people who are in the courtroom tweeting on it.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Narcissism
2. Murder conviction thrown out over juror’s Wikipedia query

Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, will be speaking on enhancing communications within the Department of Defense and between the U.S. military and Americans via social media, the new Defense.gov website and other channels.

Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009 11:30 AM – 1 PM.
Lunch will be served

Mr. Floyd will discuss using social media to expand communication within the 18 year old to 25 year old demographic, an important audience for recruiting purposes; building a platform to increase feedback from troops and their families; developing a forum for enhanced communication with American citizens; and ensuring operational security of military actions in the age of Twitter and Facebook.

RSVP:
Contact Ellen Birek at Ellen.Birek@ogilvypr.com or at (202) 729-4231

DATE:
Thursday, Nov.5, 2009

TIME:
11:30 AM – 1 PM, Lunch will be served

WHERE:
Ogilvy’s Washington Headquarters
1111 19th St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, D.C., 20036

This Ogilvy Exchange event is free and open to the public.

I will be interested in seeing any transcripts or videos from this event, since I will be at another all-day event in Baltimore that day. I will try to follow-up with someone at Ogilvy for post-event coverage.

Related posts:

1. Beth Schillaci of VillageWorks speaking on Social Media at Goucher

Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month
Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race
New Jersey Governor’s race search trends

Related posts:

1. New Jersey Governor’s race search trends
2. Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race
3. Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month

Christie has been getting the most searches in New Jersey over the past month or so. Daggett had a spike earlier in the month. All the candidates had a dip last Saturday on October 24th and now Christie leads Corzine with Daggett in third. Corzine started a slow decrease before that across the board dip that seemed to follow President Barack Obama campaigning for him.

New York is the Metro area with the most searches in New Jersey, with Philadelphia in 2nd. As far as specific cities goes, most of the searches seem to be centered around Newark.

The next chart is the one with national search trends for all three candidates.

The top three states for searches on these three candidates are New York followed by New Jersey and Pennsylvania.The New York metro area is dominating any other metro area nationally in searches.

After reading Doug Heye’s piece on how the Yankees and Phillies facing off in the World Series could impact earned media in the race, I did a comparison of all three candidates that also includes Yankees and Phillies. The chart for that (with searches originating only in New Jersey) is below.

Related posts:

1. Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race
2. Google search trends on campaigns in VA, NJ and NY
3. Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month

The search trends for both candidates have been going back and forth over the past month as stories occur in the news cycle. Most of the search traffic in Virginia for these two candidates has been in the DC Metro area. After that, Charlottesville, Roanoke, Lynchburg, Harrisonburg, and Raleigh-Durham round out the Top 5 metro areas with Virginia search traffic for McDonnell and Deeds. If you look at specific cities, Fairfax and Richmond are where most of the search interest has been in Virginia.

The next chart compares the two candidates nationally.

The results nationally are almost identical for both McDonnell and Deeds. The top 3 regions searching for the two candidates are DC, Virginia, and California. Richmond and Washington are the top two cities nationally search for the Virginia candidates.

I did a comparison of Bob McDonnell and McDonnell Thesis for the past 90 days both nationally and in Virginia. There was a spike at the end of August for the thesis search nationally that died out right after that. Results for that comparison in Virginia had negligible results on searches for the thesis.

Related posts:

1. New Jersey Governor’s race search trends
2. Google search trends on campaigns in VA, NJ and NY
3. Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month

Around October 18 and when Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman, his traffic started a rapid ascent that has continued since then with other endorsements and national attention on the race. Searches for Scozzafava have declined since then. She is now at or below the same level of searches as Owens, who has seen a slow but steady increase in searches on his name in New York.

The next chart is the same as above for all of the United State instead of just for New York. No other state even approaches New York in the amount of search traffic on the 3 candidates’ names. Both Virginia (possibly NoVa?) and Texas have seen a lot of searches on Hoffman’s name.

Related posts:

1. New Jersey Governor’s race search trends
2. Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race
3. Google search trends on campaigns in VA, NJ and NY

Don Irvine (@donirvine) will be moderating the panel. Panelists include K. Daniel Glover (@Danny_Glover), Robert Bluey (@RobertBluey), and J.P. Freire (@JPFreire).

Glover is speaking first. He is the online media strategiest for Accuracy in Media. He starts out with an ode to the microphone and then goes on to mention an incident with Al Gore and journalists earlier this month when Gore had tough questions about global warning. Glover tells of Gore being evasive and the reporter’s microphone being cut off. He also mentions another incident at the National Press Club when a phony group reserved a room and pretended to be the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Press Club left the microphone hot even when they knew the Chamber wasn’t involved.

Glover points out that the new media has microphones now too. He pointed out yesterday’s “un-endorsement” of Scozafavva in NY-23 by several conservative bloggers.

Glover points out the Tea Party movement as the best example of the use of new media by conservatives and the media ignoring them until they gained momentum. He also mentions the media attempts to quash the movement failed and that the true story of the Tea Party movement was heard via new media.

Glover also mentions the examples of Van Jones, ACORN, and the NEA. He points out the Left is ahead of the Right but that conservatives have made significant gains.

Rob Bluey, online media director for the Heritage Foundation, is the next speaker from the panel. Bluey says he plans to speak on new media and the future of journalism.

Bluey points out how hard it used to be to get into journalism in the old days. He tells of his own experiences in journalism school at Ithaca College and his dreams of a job in Washington. When he arrived in DC, he discovered that mainstream newspapers didn’t want to hire him because he was a conservative.

He originally worked for CNSNews.com and later for Human Events. Bluey points out that he got to report stories the mainstream media wouldn’t touch.

He points out the rise of bloggers while he worked at those places, including the Dan Rather Memogate scandal. The shift, he said, opened the eyes of people to the impact blogs could have. Bluey then left to work at Heritage.

He saw the impact bloggers could have on public policy debates specifically on the immigration issue. Bluey also talks about other examples of bloggers impacting policy, not just electoral politics.

He then talked about the work of Talking Points Memo on the Alberto Gonzales story from the Left and how the Right saw the potential for new media. Bluey also plugs Watchdog.org.

He also talks about the impact that non-profits can have on the policy debate by harnessing new media. He urges people to stick to the facts in their blogging and new media journalism.

J.P. Freire, associate editor of commentary for the Washington Examiner, is last. Freire talks about Fox News being under attack for offering facts that other networks are “loathe to share.”

Freire also talks about the Tea Party and Town Hall phenomena being covered heavily by Fox News as reasons for the attacks. He also mentions about Glenn Beck pushing the Van Jones story and the fact that Jones was a 9/11 Truther.

He also mentions the attacks on Limbaugh and the Obama administration sending letters to insurance companies trying to stop them from being critical of health care reform.

He talks about fact-checking, muckraking and looking at the data being a tenet of the Examiner and others like Fox News and those in new media doing the same. He mentions that he had a jarring moment when his mother said she had tweeted Bret Baier of Fox to say she had enjoyed his reporting.

Freire then talks about all of the people he came into contact with at the first Tea Parties in DC and the insightful comments on the Examiner website. He mentions that conservatives who normally wouldn’t be active in politics are motivated and fired up now and are speaking out.

Freire talks about the large fact-checking body in place because of citizens becoming active in the process. He points out that the standards might not be the same as traditional journalism but that the standards of traditional journalism aren’t the same as they used to be.

The question and answer session follows. Glover talks about the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan being points where those on the left and the right got involved. Bluey mentions Memogate and mentions when bloggers were invited to a bill-signing by the Bush White House in 2006. He also mentions blogger involvement in the John Roberts and Samuel Alito confirmation hearings. Glover also mentions the online activity after Katrina when the pork-laden transportation bill was passed. He mentions his activity with Porkbusters on Patrol at Eyeblast.tv and videotaping things like the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska. Freire talks about the rise of talk radio and the Internet and things online pushing towards decentralization.

A question on advertising gets Bluey to talk about different advertising models for different types of websites and blogs. Freire talks about all the money that is lost in inefficient newspapers even with the ad revenue. He talks about the lesser expenses for new media. He thinks advertisers will continue to play a role online and he talks about the issues of print vs. online at newspapers. Glover uses the example of dollar coins vs. dollar bvills to discuss the differences in print and online advertising. He says the advertisers don’t necessarily understand or trust online like they do print. Freire gives the example of a friend who thought the ACORN videos were inappropriate because of the hard lives that people who are served by ACORN live. He points out that he asked the friend why she thought the videos should be hidden from the taxpayers who helped fund ACORN.

Other questions well on funding, what politics would have been like 25 years ago with today’s new media, and how to get people involved in new media.

Related posts:

1. Jonah Goldberg on the evolution of media
2. Tony Blankley on media
3. New media topics at AIM 40th Anniversary Conference

Some monumental changes in technology have changed things, according to Goldberg. He said the monopoly is dead and the market is somewhat deregulated. Goldberg gives the Memogate/Dan Rather situation as an example and points out that 20 years earlier Bush would have lost the election over it. Instead bloggers and others investigated and fact-checked the story and Dan Rather lost his job over it.

Another example given by Goldberg is the ACORN prostitution videos filmed by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.

Goldberg’s last point is that he doesn’t want the mainstream media to go away; he wants them to get better. He wants there to be more conservatives at the Washington Post and New York Times instead of just a bunch more conservative media outlets.

Related posts:

1. New Media Panel
2. Tony Blankley on media
3. New media topics at AIM 40th Anniversary Conference