Few people relish the prospect of serving on a jury, yet anyone who has done so knows how gripping and satisfying it can be. Pitfalls of fame. Already jurors in high-profile televised trials become semifamous from publicity. While there is no evidence that such media publicity has affected any verdicts, that's probably because individual jurors, compared with other trial participants, still maintain some tattered veil of anonymity. Had the Simpson deliberations been televised, the jurors would all be more famous than Kato Kaelin.
Celebrity tends to warp judgment.
A juror in a televised deliberation who wanted to sell a memoir after his service, or wanted generally to advance an ideological agenda, might be tempted to make his performance more theatrical or strident by taking a position that differed from what seemed right in the circumstances. A juror wary of looking dumb on TV might avoid asking the obvious question that would sharpen his understanding of the case. The Simpson-type cases are the ones whose jury deliberations will be most attractive to TV, and the ones where scrutiny is most likely to distort the legal process. Yet even in unglitzy cases, abuses are possible. One may have occurred already.