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Social distanced justice? Courts restart trials, struggle to adapt to COVID-19 precautions

ABC News: “As courts across the country begin to cautiously resume in-person hearings through the COVID-19 pandemic, judges are confronting a vexing challenge: how to safely convene jury trials at a time when health officials continue to caution against public gatherings. With no real federal guidance or uniform system governing the nation’s vast judiciary, current and former judges from the local to federal level described to ABC News a puzzling process that will go into mapping out different methods to implement social distancing practices — with each community and facility presenting its own unique set of challenges. While all agreed there is no catch-all solution to protect every citizen who enters a courtroom, the judges say they are seeking to avoid what has been described as a “nightmare scenario” in which a single confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis of a participant or juror would likely throw a case into a state of paralysis…”

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