Dismissing Jurors

The obligatory link: Judge Dismisses CIA Leak Trial Juror

My fascination with this (admittedly obscure) topic began back when I read the book "Runaway Jury", which, unlike the movie, was rather gripping, and quite the page-turner. Anyway, with all the exhortations from the judge in that book not to see or have other contact with material about the case outside of the courtroom, the story was obviously setting up to play on that point (it did)... but I couldn't see for the life of me how real people could actually do such a thing. As I've found in paying attention since then, though, judges orders to juries seem to be along the lines of a "wet paint" sign. (What do you do when you see a sign that says "wet paint"? You touch the paint to see if it's still wet, naturally. It's an action to regular human curiosity.) Really, it says a lot more about human nature than it does about the nature of judges and juries.

Meanwhile, of course, normal case watchers are just waiting for the verdict to come in. That should be interesting in its own right.