We are often complaining about the lack of transparent privacy features on Facebook and forget that we are, in most cases, responsible ourselves for inconvenient leaks. Lesson #97: Don’t announce jury verdicts on Facebook before the trial ends.

A 20-year old juror is in hot water over a status message posted on her Facebook profile. Hadley Jons said that it’s “gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re guilty”. The problem, of course, was that the trial was far from its end and, according to an AP report, that the prosecution was still at laying out its resisting arrest case.

It was not so much fun for Jons after all, as the status message got legs and eventually was found by the son of the defense attorney, who informed the trial judge. Circuit Judge Diane Druzinski confronted Jons and subsequently replaced her. She called the incident disturbing and defense attorney Saleema Sheikh said that Jons should get some jail time for her status message, According to the AP, Sheikh’s client was convicted of a felony but did not agree on another misdemeanor charge.

Announcing a possible jury verdict on Facebook may not be such a good idea. But then we can always blame Facebook for a lack of privacy features.

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