I’m not from the US so I’m not quite sure if I got this right: During a court trial jury members are not allowed to be influenced by the outside so they are cut off from the society during the duration of the trial.
But how does this work. Taking the heard depp defamation trial as an example. The trial should last for 5 weeks in addition to a 10 days break. So are the jury members isolated for more than 6 weeks or how does this exactly work?
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If you want to see how jury sequestering works (in the rare cases where it’s used), you can always watch the miniseries *The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story*. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the O.J. Simpson murder trial, but the long and short of it is that he is a former football player and actor who was accused of murdering his ex-wife and one of her friends in 1994. Because of his fame, the trial was a media circus and the jury was kept sequestered.
But to make a long story short, in the rare cases where juries are sequestered, they are often kept in hotels, where all their needs paid for by the government and they are forbidden to watch television, read recent newspapers or magazines, or have unsupervised telephone conversations. This is not a cheap thing to do, so it’s not used in the majority of jury trials. There are lots of trials every single day and the media really doesn’t care about the vast majority of them; thus, there’s no real need to sequester every jury.
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