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Basically, judges are getting pissed that it’s getting harder for them to lie to juries about what the law is.

No, it's getting harder for judges to insure that juries are not influenced by inadmissable evidence. How you feel if you were one of the Duke defendants and the case had gone to trial and you knew the jurors were googling the New York Times' and Rayleigh Observor's coverage of the case?

Lots of good points of view here. As I see the general issue, lots of innocent people get convicted for a variety of reasons while even more of the guilty go free either by a faulty or manipulated judgment of the jury or by evidence being withheld or even the entire proceeding being ‘thrown out.’

I agree that the more a juror knows of the facts and circumstances about the entire case, the better. However, insuring that jurors don’t dupe themselves by reading editorials or other opinion pieces about the case is very problematic. After all, anyone can write or blog about the “facts” in a case when in reality the biased journalist or blogger either skewed the information or perhaps he made it up altogether.

After all, we all know that if you read something on the internet, it must be true.

No, it's getting harder for judges to insure that juries are not influenced by inadmissable evidence.

The idea that juries are supposed to judge based entirely on the evidence presented to them, without considering the entirety of their knowledge, is an ahistorical invention of law school professors. We have the right to be judged by a jury of our peers precisely because they are presumed to have a knowledge of the circumstances that a judge cannot.

No, it's getting harder for judges to insure that juries are not influenced by inadmissable evidence. How you feel if you were one of the Duke defendants and the case had gone to trial and you knew the jurors were googling the New York Times' and Rayleigh Observor's coverage of the case?

Exactly so. The difficult truth of any human system of justice is that lacks the omniscience of God. Without that certainty of knowing, truly, of guilt or innocence, one comes up with a human system to administer justice. This may be a monarch sitting in judgement over subjects, a panel of civil law judges, or any number of other systems, including our own. A human system of "Justice" can even be wholly unjust, such as the vile treatment of Jews under the Nuremberg laws.

Generally speaking of our American system, (and the related British system), we choose to pursue such justice as we perceive to mesh with the rights of man. We choose therefore to create rules that treat the accused, equally, as innocent until proven guilty (except in traffic court). Thus, those protections that we weep and moan over when applied to the guilty (or even the "he's such a villain he's gotta be guilty), are often the last defenses of the innocent against the power of the state.

Of course, we all trust the state and its agents never to abuse their power, right?

On a related topic, see here: A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison - WSJ.com