SOCIAL MEDIA
The trial of David Woods played out in a courtroom and in social media.
sharing this journey with those of us that couldn’t be there.”
In an interview Friday, Chief Justice Martel Popescul noted the Saskatchewan court system began allowing accredited reporters to use their phones for live reporting in late 2012.
“I think social media’s a good thing. I think it’s another avenue to get the word out as to what we’re doing,” Popescul said. When the jury announced its verdict in the David Woods murder trial, news spread immediately over social media.
The nine-woman, three-man jury found David Woods guilty of the first-degree murder of his wife Dorothy Woods after hearing two and a half weeks of evidence, then deliberating for seven hours.
The verdict was shared on Twitter by multiple news reporters at 8:11 p.m. Thursday evening and within minutes was retweeted close to 100 times — not a big number by global Twitter standards, but a sign of the public’s interest in a trial that came to its dramatic conclusion in the evening hours.
Some members of the public started sharing their reactions immediately.
At 8:15 p.m., Twitter user ninja-Pattison responded to the guilty announcement, saying, “I was sad I couldn’t be there for my aunt Dorothy. Thank you (for covering the trial).”
Twitter user Loretta Sinclair tweeted at 8:18 p.m.: “Thanks for
“It’s been said that justice done in the darkness of secrecy is no justice at all. We have to have it out there for everyone to see. I think that the courts are very much alive to that and try to do the best we can to keep it open.”
He presided over the Woods trial, but said he couldn’t comment on it specifically. One day early in the trial, however, Popescul addressed the media in open court after a photo of Dorothy Woods’s body, still wrapped in layers of plastic shortly after she was discovered by police, was tweeted by a reporter (it was then deleted). He directed members of the media from that point onward to get explicit permission to photograph any of the exhibits.
“IT SEEMS TO FEED THE PUBLIC’S FASCINATION WITH REAL-TIME REPORTING. I THINK IT SERVES A PURPOSE AND I THINK IT’S HEALTHY.”
MICHAEL NOLIN
“When I found out that one thing had been tweeted that ought not to have been tweeted, that came to my attention very quickly from people that had been monitoring, the sheriffs, and I thought that was corrected appropriately,” Popescul said.
Woods’s defence lawyer Michael Nolin said he had no problem, in general terms, with media tweeting from the courtroom.
“It seems to feed the public’s fascination with real-time reporting. I think it serves a purpose and I think it’s healthy,” he said.
Nolin did wonder, however, about the effects on jurors having access to such a wide amount of information on their smartphones, even though they’re instructed to avoid all media reports about a trial while it’s ongoing.
“I think it’s going to be an emerging issue for the legal industry down the road to consider in jury trials, to ensure the trial fairness is protected,” he said.
Popescul said he is confident jurors in all trials take their duties very seriously, and the justice system has to rely on jurors’ integrity.
When a jury is sequestered to deliberate, though, there’s no media available to them.
“When the jurors are sequestered, their phones are taken away,” Popescul said. “When they are put in a hotel room, the televisions are taken out, and I believe the phones are taken out as well, so they are sequestered in that fashion.”