Originally published by Douglas Keene.
“Other very rural venues have shown us the extent to which the internet has passed by some Americans completely. At one site, of 36 mock jurors, only 4 had internet access. At another, of 48 jurors, only 11 had ‘smart phones’ while a majority didn’t understand the question. Most had “not heard of” Amazon.com’s website. One called a major social networking site, “the devil’s work” and others nodded somberly.”
Granted, this was about 5 years ago, but I am confident that this remains one of those corners of the “late-adopter” universe. You have to do a very different presentation for jurors who have never heard of Amazon and don’t know what you mean by “a smart phone”. Especially when smart phones have become pretty ubiquitous across the country. This disconnect from technology is the sort of information you want to know prior to trial since it can require a significant retooling of the case narrative for these jurors to understand the case facts—especially when the case is one of a high-tech nature.
Here is what the Pew study reported about those 15% of Americans who don’t use the internet:
34% of those who do not use the internet say it is because they have “no interest” or the internet is “not relevant” to their lives. 32% say the internet is “too difficult to use” and 8% say they are simply “too old to learn”. 19% said it was too expensive.
40% of older adults (65 and up) say they do not use the internet (compared to only 3% of the 18 to 29 years olds).
33% of adults with less than a high school education say they never go online.
Adults with household incomes below $30K a year are about 8x more likely than most affluent adults to not use the internet.
Rural Americans are about 2x as likely to never use the internet than are urban or suburban residents.
20% of Blacks and 18% of Hispanics do not use the internet compared with 14% of Whites and 5% of English-speaking Asian-Americans (which are the group least likely to be offline).
In other words, people who do not use the internet look identical to those in our large research project described earlier. And their world view is different from that of the urbanite/suburbanite. A woman in a mock trial referred to social media as “the devil’s work”. She was an older, White, retired schoolteacher who had apparently been distressed by the participation of students in social networking sites prior to her retirement. While her statement generated giggles and good-natured hisses from counsel who allegedly represented the devil (from the privacy of a closed-circuit viewing room)—there was no mirroring humor in the mock juror presentation room to her remark. They simply nodded with somber expressions. And after that understanding was seen (through the miracle of modern technology) in the observation room, all frivolity was gone. It was a big case with multiple defendants and they had all just realized they were not in “Kansas” (or New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington, DC, Atlanta, et cetera) anymore.
From a litigation advocacy perspective, presenting a case to people who do not use the internet means you have to think about what you are going to say, examples you will use, effective metaphors, whether you will use computerized presentations or visual evidence boards, and so on. You need to be sure that what you say is understood by the listeners. If that isn’t a scary thing to you, it probably should be a scary thing. Once you step into rural America, you are likely to be unfamiliar with the world view shared by your jurors.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
from Texas Bar Today http://ift.tt/1Pbs2ki
via Abogado Aly Website
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