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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

Is there any issue with judges reading newspaper articles about cases they're in? I know that jury members aren't supposed to, are judges fine?

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Yes. Judges have extreme latitude in what they consider and how they run a trial. Consider the recent case in Hawaii ruling on the travel ban. Quote: "The Court will not crawl into a corner, pull the shutters closed, and pretend it has not seen what it has."

(The reference is to the President's statements before and after the election)

Many seem to be surprised reading this transcript. Yet the tone this judge is using isn't anything special. You can see that he takes extreme care not to disadvantage one side, without pretending to be some sort of soulless automaton.

There's a difference between considering details that have been entered into the record by the parties, and saying "oh I saw X in the newspaper". I assume in that case the plaintiff took the President's statements and put it in their filings.

But the judge wasn't using the newspaper report as part of his consideration. He was just offering it up as something that the defendant should be willing put into the court record (instead of taking the Fifth). The fact that it appeared in a paper is, OTOH, clear-as-day evidence that stuff is not being shown to the court, which he's saying has some value as a datapoint on its own (irrespective of the content).

Jury members, to be poignant about it, are not trusted to be objective. They are peers of the defendant. Historically they were the proletariat, and hence uneducated, base, and instinctive.

Judges are supposed to be people who can be trusted to be objective. They are chosen (or, before they were elected, and politics became divisive) for their trustworthiness and objective scholarship. Historically they were well educated, of a higher class, perceived to be of a higher moral character.

The point is judges are expected to be mostly objective, and use external information responsibly.

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