A recent post on Reason's Volokh Conspiracy blog highlights a piece of colorful lawyer wisdom: "If you throw a skunk into the jury box, you can't instruct the jury not to smell it." The post notes that the phrase appears in the 1962 Fifth Circuit case Dunn v. U.S., and that the author found versions of the saying in newspapers going back to 1931, suggesting it may have been a familiar expression even earlier.
The metaphor speaks to a core problem in trial procedure: once jurors have been exposed to inadmissible or highly prejudicial information, a judge's instruction to disregard it is often ineffective. The skunk's smell, like the taint of improper evidence, cannot simply be ordered away.
The post does not analyze any particular case or policy debate; it is primarily a historical and linguistic observation about the maxim's longevity. The surrounding headlines on the same page — covering topics from school scholarships to a donkey shooting — are unrelated to the skunk metaphor and are not part of the analysis.