The Power of the Internet: What You Say in Guyana Doesn't Stay in Guyana

In United States v. Khan, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52373 (E.D. N.Y. July 19, 2007), Judge Irizarry issued a gag order, ruling that the statements of the defendant's attorney in a drug trafficking case violated Eastern District of New York Local Criminal Rule 23.1 because they identified prospective government witnesses, attempted to publicly tarnish the credibility of witnesses, commented on the merits of the case, and discussed evidence that the attorney knew or should have know would be inadmissible at trial.  While the statements were made to the press in Guyana, they made their way to the Eastern District by various means, including Internet Web sites and blogs.

Although this is a criminal case, the court's comments about the ability of the Internet to proliferate information have broad applicability.

In relating the statements made in Guyana to the local jury pool, the court emphasized that the Guyanese community in New York is not insignificant (being the largest outside Guyana) and that members of the Guyanese press also attended hearings in the case. The court also conducted its own Google search to determine how widespread the attorney's statements had been reported on the Internet. Judge Irizarry firmly rejected the argument that it "strains credulity" to assert that statements made to the foreign press are unlikely to affect the local New York jury pool:

In considering this motion, the court visited the Internet and ran a "Google" search for Defendant's name. Over two thousand "hits" came up, not all of which, of course, were related to the Defendant. Nonetheless, many were related to him--there were "blogs" about this case, as well as news stories on informal and formal news web sites, such as the ones brought to the court's attention by the government. Furthermore, there were news web sites reporting on Defendant and this case targeting the Jamaican population and the West Indian population in general, as well as sites in Spanish targeting the Latin American community, specifically South Americans. There was even a Cuban site concerned with this case. This is not the isolationist America of Woodrow Wilson. We live in a global community. People from Latin America, from the Caribbean and elsewhere have an interest in what happens in neighboring countries. Moreover, we have immigrants, residents, and descendants from these countries in the United States, especially in the various boroughs and surrounding areas of New York City, several of which fall within this district. Many of these people maintain a strong interest in events occurring in their home countries, or countries of descent. It is therefore not a stretch, in this court's view, to believe that remarks made by Simels in Guyana may well reach and influence our richly diverse jury pool in this district. At the very minimum, there can certainly be no per se rule that statements made to members of a foreign press will not impact the jury pool here.