ResourceBlog Article: A Judge May Google to Confirm Intuition: Court

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Wednesday, 24th March 2010

A Judge May Google to Confirm Intuition: Court

From the Article:

A federal appeals court said it can be acceptable for a judge to conduct an Internet search to confirm an intuition about a matter of common knowledge.

[Snip]

he case concerned an Internet search performed by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, whom President Barack Obama has nominated to fill a vacant seat on the Second Circuit.

Prosecutors alleged that Anthony Bari, who served 12 years in prison for bank robbery, violated terms of his release by robbing a Ridgewood Savings Bank branch in Bronx, New York.

Chin reviewed several pieces of evidence, including a bank surveillance video showing a robber who wore a yellow rain hat. A yellow rain hat was found in the garage of Bari's landlord.

Noting similarities between the hats, Chin at a hearing said he resorted to Google Inc's search engine for help. "We did a Google search," and "one can Google yellow rain hats and find lots of different yellow rain hats," he said.

[Snip]

he government said the search was fine, citing another rule that lets judges note facts "not subject to reasonable dispute" and which can be learned from accurate sources.

In its decision, the appeals court said most federal evidence rules "do not apply with their full force" in proceedings to revoke supervised releases.

Using this "relaxed" standard, it endorsed Chin's effort to confirm his "common sense supposition" that more than one yellow rain hat is available for sale.

But it went further, saying improved broadband speeds and Internet search engines cut the cost of confirming intuitions.

The court said that 20 years ago. "a trial judge may have needed to travel to a local department store to survey the rain hats on offer.

Notes: For those of you following the Google Book Search case, the U.S. District Judge Denny Chin (mentioned in this article) is the same judge in the GBS case.

Even though Google was used in this case and is also mentioned in the title of the article, we would imagine a judge would likely be free to use any web engine either large like Bing or Yahoo or small such as a specialty database.

Source: Reuters
Hat Tip: The Laboratorium

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