Education is the “very foundation of good citizenship,” wrote Justice Earl Warren in his 1954 opinion for Brown v. Board of Education. [1] Nearly twenty years later, in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that “some degree of education is necessary to prepare citizens to participate effectively and intelligently in our open political system.” [2] Often, however, public school curricula lack civic education requirements, and thus do not adequately prepare citizens to understand and engage with the United States’ democratic system of government.
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A 2021 study by Pew Research Center found that nearly 90% of Americans use the internet, social media, or smartphones regularly to access the news. [1] The proliferation of online information is particularly influential in high publicity cases—cases that involve terrorism or violent crime, garnering high levels of national media attention—in which juries may be skewed by the media they consume. In United States v. Tsarnaev (2021), the case of the Boston Marathon bomber currently on appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court, the risks of media bias are especially clear. In Tsarnaev’s case and similarly high publicity cases, trial judges ought to exercise more rigorous voir dire questioning on media consumption in order to protect defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to a “trial by an impartial jury.”
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