During court, when something happens and the judge tells the jury to ‘forget that’ or ‘not include that,’ if the jury heard it, how could I, as someone on the jury, possibly just ignore what I heard? Whether the evidence is admissible or not.
During court, when something happens and the judge tells the jury to ‘forget that’ or ‘not include that,’ if the jury heard it, how could I, as someone on the jury, possibly just ignore what I heard? Whether the evidence is admissible or not.
First the direct answer: you can’t.
Some more context: there’s usually ways to deal with this issue. There’s voir dire for example, where you can do a practice run of the questions and answers for a specific witness, or the party can profer (idk if it’s spelled correctly) the testimony, giving the judge a general idea of the direct or cross-examination.
This usually only happens if something goes wrong. It can be things like the lawyer overstepping a boundary by accident, but it’s very frowned upon and they can be admonished and sanctioned by the judge.
For why to do about the “can’t put the shit back in the horse”, usually the judge gives the jury an admonishment and maybe even a curative instruction right before deliberation, but best case scenario it’s been handled in advance and doesn’t even happen.
Basically the idea is to keep the jury “as clean as possible in their decision”. Best case they only hear the stuff that’s relevant, but any other case you try to tell them to disregard things or remind them what to consider, and you hope they feel duty-bound to uphold this.
Generally it is understood that juries take their obligation extremely seriously and most of the time they genuinely make an effort to rule out evidence that shouldn’t have come in. Of course there are outliers.