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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I live in Canada and I served jury duty once a few years ago. Can’t say for sure it’s the same in the US, but I’d be surprised if it’s too much different. Here’s how my experience went:
We were allowed to go home during the trial itself, we were only forbidden from talking about the case with anyone (on the honor system, although to be fair this wasn’t a high profile case like the Heard/Depp case is. As long as I didn’t bring it up myself, I was unlikely to trip over anyone else talking about it.)
We were sequestered for one night during deliberations (after the trial itself was concluded and it was up to us to come to a verdict) and that was only because we didn’t come to a consensus in a single day. We were taken to a specific hotel that had rooms assigned for the purpose, and the TVs had been disabled in the rooms. There were a couple of court officials staying in one room as well, in case we needed anything, but I don’t think they were standing guard or anything (to be fair, I didn’t poke my head out to check.)
When it was getting close to the end of the trial, we were told to pack a bag for a couple of nights and bring it in case we needed to be sequestered once we entered deliberations.
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