But Judge Kaplan explicitly advised prospective jurors the opposite of your advice. “You are to look at no newspapers, listen to no press accounts, do no internet research,” he said.
It’s a funny thing about the American criminal justice system, that they like people not to know very much. Historically, it wasn't always that way. There was once a sense that you should have a judgment by your peers who were kind of knowledgeable about the context and the situation.Quibble with elements of it, sure, but I think we all understand the reasons behind limiting a jury's exposure to things!
I'm sure Lewis has written a critique of this at length elsewhere, and it isn't just something he discovered when his special little boy got in trouble!