Doug Clifton says he doesn’t really know why newsies haven’t done it in the past. It’s like one of those policies people forgot to write down.
It seems to me that the Tyco case might warrant a suspension of the unwritten rule.
An audience of millions might know that a particular juror owns Tyco stock; or was heard to call the defendants crooks; or is related to a lifelong friend of a defendant; or any one of hundreds of things that the juror might not reveal in the selection process but that might affect juror objectivity.
In the Tyco case we had a juror who was supposedly gumming up the works, which raises (see, Bill, I didn’t say “begs”) the question of who that juror is. Tough call — I’d lean toward naming the juror in a civil case, but if it were a mob trial I’d probably be more circumspect.