Facebook juror gets eight months prison

THE SOCIAL NETWORKING JUROR Joanne Fraill has been sentenced to eight months in prison for her troubles.

By 'her troubles' we mean the havoc she caused in a multi-million pound drugs case, which she single handedly ruined by choosing to exchange vapid rubbish with a defendent through Facebook.

Fraill, a forty year old woman, contacted Jamie Sewart, 34, on Facebook during trial and looked up details about another defendent on the internet. These were both actions that jurors had been cautioned not to engage in while the trial was underway.

If that's not shocking enough, the chats, a portion of which we had reproduced yesterday, were almost impenetrable due to their woefully illiterate grasp of the English language and the content.

For example, we learned that Sewart had some sort of dental issue, or as she had it, "did u notice that my front tooth fell out the 2nd day of the trialll hahhahahha wot do i look like."

And, well, Fraill said something. "i came runnin in i was listenin at the doors ha ha," reads one important message, and, "jamie am gonna get off this lot doing me head in x it be over tomoz fingers crossed , im not as daft as am cabbage looking hahaha," read another.

It's a sorry state of affairs that this sort of thing goes on, and though the sentence is not a mere slap on the wrist, perhaps it will discourage any similar displays of bad judgement by jurors.

According to the Guardian, the judge's written ruling called out Frail for her 'flagrant breaches' of court orders. "Her conduct in visiting the internet repeatedly was directly contrary to her oath as a juror, and her contact with the acquitted defendant, as well as her repeated searches on the internet, constituted flagrant breaches of the orders made by the judge for the proper conduct of the trial," the judge's ruling said.

Or, in some form of the English language that the errant juror Fraill might understand, "OMG! wot she dun was sooooooooo bad." µ