Column by Wyatt Emmerich
It’s hard enough getting good people to serve on juries without further driving them away by banning mobile phone usage in the courtroom. The state legislature, or the courts, should stop this ancient practice and allow people to be productive while waiting endless hours during the slow, convoluted process of selecting jurors.
For most gainfully employed people, jury duty is an impossibility because vanishing from the work world for days, if not weeks, is simply not possible. This is especially true for the most productive citizens. For many owner operated small businesses, losing key employees for an unknown period of time would be devastating. As a result, some of our best potential jurors are effectively excluded from the ability to serve on a jury.
The mobile smartphone is an amazing device, allowing individuals to work anywhere. Yet courtrooms in Mississippi, for flimsy reasons, have a universal ban on smartphones. This is especially obnoxious when citizens are expected to wait hours upon hours during the tedious and lengthy process of jury selection. You also see smartphones excluded from courtrooms as the deliberate traffic tickets and minor charges. Across our state every day, thousands of citizens are forced to sit like unproductive bumps on logs for hours at a time while they wait to explain their innocence on a speeding ticket or parking violation.
There is simply no reason for a universal blanket ban on smartphones in the courtroom. No doubt, there are situations when such a ban may make sense and disruptive smartphone use can always be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But the outright ban of smartphones in courtrooms is an unproductive waste. If the courts won’t address this situation, some state legislator should introduce legislation to make this happen.
