The Justice Game (5 page)

    Despite his earlier bravado, Jason did not have a good feeling about this one.

    He reached for his glass and took a sip of water.

    “Do you have a verdict?” Judge Waters asked.

    “We do.” The foreperson was Juror 4, a nicely dressed middle-aged woman in the back row. She worked in PR for one of the Hollywood studios. Drank Diet Mountain Dew. Subscribed to
Entertainment Weekly.
Voted Democrat. Contributed to green causes and PETA. Definitely not Jason’s choice for forewoman.

    She handed the slip containing the verdict to the bailiff, who in turn handed it to the judge.

    Judge Waters studied it for a minute, seemingly enjoying her chance to torture the lawyers.
How long does it take to read the word
guilty
?

    She handed it back to the bailiff and nodded. The bailiff walked to the center of the courtroom, and Judge Waters asked the defendant and her lawyer to stand. The bailiff held the paper in front of him, as if preparing to read from an ancient scroll of Scripture in the middle of the Temple. He waited, soaking in the moment.

    “We the jury, on the count of murder in the first degree, find the defendant…” The bailiff hesitated.

    Time stood still. Jason wanted to puke.

    “… guilty.” The bailiff looked straight at the defendant and Austin Lockhart. Jason barely reacted, other than a quick glance at his two favorite jurors accompanied by a slight nod. They both acknowledged the look with a discreet smile, proud of their role in the deliberation process.

    Austin had the jury polled while Jason leaned back in his seat, watching each juror affirm the verdict as their own. After a series of mistrial motions, all of which were denied by Judge Waters, the jury was dismissed and the bailiff led them out.

    One jury down, two juries to go.

This first jury, the one that got to watch the case unfold live, was the most important. But there were two other similar juries, seated in two other moot courtrooms, each watching the proceedings on closed-circuit TV. All three of these shadow juries were made up of Los Angeles–area residents and were designed to mimic the exact characteristics of the real jury, who had been impaneled a few days earlier to hear the actual case in a downtown L.A. courtroom.

    Jason’s company, Justice Inc., was a sophisticated jury consulting and research firm. For major trials, they impaneled three shadow juries as soon as the actual jury was seated. The company rushed through a confidential mock trial in a few days of intense proceedings, arriving at a verdict well before the real trial concluded. A prediction for the real case would then be communicated to privileged investors and would result in millions of dollars of stock purchases or option sales surrounding the affected companies.

    The shadow jurors were paid handsomely and sworn to confidentiality. In addition, they would only know the verdict for their own panel, so even if they broke the confidentiality agreement, they would not be able to leak complete results.

    The first shadow jury, the one privileged to view Jason and the other lawyer in person, was the jury that most closely mirrored the actual jury. But the president of Justice Inc., Robert Sherwood, never liked putting millions of dollars on the line unless all three shadow juries reached the same result. Even then, the votes of individual jurors were fed into the company’s complex profiling software so unexpected results could be flagged and studied. The company’s high-priced analysts would also study the shadow juries’ deliberations for hours to make sure the outcomes weren’t a fluke, perhaps driven by one juror’s strong personality or a quirk in the mock trial proceedings that might not occur in the real case.

    Jason settled into the second courtroom and watched the jurors assemble in the jury box after Judge Waters gave the word. For the first time in three days, the large screen on which the jurors had been viewing the proceedings had been replaced by live participants. Jason had not seen these jurors before and always found it interesting to compare the back-up mock jurors to the first-stringers. Even though the micromarketing profile of each juror had been carefully screened to reflect the micromarketing profile of the corresponding member of the real jury, each shadow panel looked significantly different from the others. For example, this panel’s Juror 5, one of Jason’s main allies according to her profile, was thinner and had a skeptical scowl that had never crossed the face of Juror 5 in the main moot courtroom.

    But looks weren’t the key. As Robert Sherwood phrased it, “Man looks on the outside, but Justice Inc. looks at the heart.” It was classic Sherwood—part satire, part arrogance, and dead-on accurate. He was a man to be feared and respected, if not entirely admired.

    Each shadow juror had been selected based on how closely they tracked the micromarketing profile of an actual juror. Political parties, medications taken, shopping habits, magazines read, religious backgrounds, favorite Internet sites and TV shows, sports teams, ages of children, even the type of car each juror drove—all of these factors and a hundred more had been carefully researched and analyzed by Justice Inc.’s massive investigative team. Complex software programs weighted each factor according to the type of case involved, then filtered the prospective jurors using an algorithm based on the weighted factors, identifying virtual clones of the actual jurors.

    The system worked. During Jason’s year and a half at the company, the shadow juries had only been wrong once, and that was a split decision where two of the shadow juries came down on one side and the third went the other way.

    Today, the second jury fell in line with the first and declared Van Wyck guilty. Jason nodded at the jurors and kicked back in his chair while Austin had them polled and gave them his best scowl. Once again, the jurors held their ground, and the lawyers, judge, and court personnel moved on to the third courtroom.

    By now, Jason was barely sweating. He had already won the case. The only question left was whether it would be unanimous.

    It may have been his closing. Or his clinical dismantling of the defendant’s lead expert. Or perhaps the fact that Van Wyck had decided not to take the stand in her own defense. Something was swaying these jurors. Later, Jason would study the tapes and find out exactly what it was.

    “Does the jury have a verdict?” Judge Waters asked.

    “We do,” the forewoman said. It was Juror 7, a single young mom, a sure sign that Jason was about to go three for three. She handed the form to the bailiff, stealing a quick glance at the defendant. Normally, the eye contact would have worried Jason, but this time he blew it off. This was Juror 7, whose profile screamed law-and-order, a sure bet to love Jason’s side of the case. Plus, women in general tended to like Jason and hate the arrogant defendant. It was the men who fell under the rock star’s spell.

    Maybe Juror 7 just wanted the chance to see a look of hope in the defendant’s eyes, just before the verdict shattered it.

    Judge Waters studied the verdict and handed it to the bailiff, instructing the woman who had been filling in for Kendra Van Wyck to stand alongside Austin Lockhart.

    Again the bailiff took his spot in the middle of the courtroom. “On the count of murder in the first degree, we the jury find the defendant…”

    As always, he hesitated.

    “… not guilty.”

    
“Yes,”
Austin Lockhart responded, under his breath but loud enough for Jason to hear.

    Jason looked at the bailiff in disbelief, as if he had misread the result. Then he reminded himself—
play the part.
The stoic lawyer. Unflappable. All in a day’s work.

    “Do you want to poll the jury?” Judge Waters asked.

    Jason eyeballed them. They looked tired. Most avoided eye contact. They seemed sure of what they had done.

    “Nah,” Jason said with a shrug, as if the judge had just inquired about a lunch recess. “I think they probably meant it.”

Two hours later, Jason knocked on the door of room 301, a large corner suite in the Malibu Beach Inn occupied by Andrew Lassiter, the brains behind Justice Inc.

    As was his custom, Jason came bearing a large pizza—half meat-lover’s and half cheese—an order of spicy chicken wings, blue cheese, a six-pack of beer, and a bottle of Diet Coke. The beer, wings, and meat-lover’s side of the pizza were all for Lassiter, a string bean of a man whose metabolism was off the charts. Jason had never seen Lassiter exercise, but his brain cells alone probably burned more calories than most people’s entire bodies.

    Tonight, Lassiter answered the door in pleated brown dress pants, a tucked-in T-shirt, and socks with a small hole on top of the right big toe. His shaggy brown hair hung down over his forehead, kept out of his eyes by a funky pair of black-rimmed glasses. He had a touch of gray around the temples, the only thing that hinted at the fact that he had graduated from MIT nearly twenty years and two bankruptcies ago. At age nineteen.

    He took the pizza from Jason and locked the door behind them while Jason unloaded his other goodies on the round table in the middle of the room.

    “State’s Exhibit 12,” Jason said. It was a game Jason played with the man who possessed a photographic memory that never ceased to amaze him.

    Lassiter stared at Jason for a minute as if reading an imaginary teleprompter. He blinked a few times, a distracting nervous habit.

    “Lab results,” he said. “Toxicology tests for hair evidence. You want the numbers?”

    “I trust you. Let’s try Juror 6—religious affiliation.”

    Lassiter blinked again and put a few wings on a plastic plate, opening the small container of blue cheese. Jury information was his specialty. “Former Catholic. Attends Mass twice a year. Married a backslidden Baptist.”

    Jason shook his head. “Sometime, you’ll have to show me how to do that.”

    Lassiter popped open his first beer and opened a video file on his computer screen. “Let’s go straight to the third panel.”

    “Might as well,” Jason said. Following each case, the two men would get together to watch the deliberations of the main jury panel, learning a little more about what made jurors tick. Tonight, Lassiter apparently had the same idea as Jason—better to watch the panel that Jason lost and try to figure out what went wrong.

    Jason moved his chair around for a better view. Lassiter started in on the wings.

    “It was probably Juror 7,” Lassiter said between bites.

    “Seven?” Jason asked. He walked over to the couch, where receipts, case information, and folded clothes were stacked in neat piles. He moved one of the piles aside and found the large black spiral notebook for the third shadow jury, containing detailed profiles for every juror. Each data point in the book was also lodged someplace in Lassiter’s brain. “Why Juror 7?”

    Lassiter finished devouring a wing and leaned back in his chair as the jury deliberations came up on the screen. “Her husband had an affair,” he said. “Ended up in a painful divorce messier than Juror 7 on either of the other panels. She probably didn’t like your little nod to William Congreve—‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’—or the fact that the jilted wife is always the state’s number one suspect.”

    Jason absorbed the news in silence. He stood behind Lassiter and kept one eye on the computer monitor as he glanced through the profile of Juror 7 in the black notebook.

    On the screen, the jury was busy selecting a foreperson. Juror 4, a middle manager at a software company, was the first to put his name in play. But Juror 7 suggested that, since the defendant was a woman, maybe they should consider a woman for chairperson.

    Before Jason could blink, somebody had suggested that Juror 7 take the role. She put up a token protest and was promptly voted in anyway.

    Jason sat down next to Lassiter. He pulled a slice of pizza free and placed it on his plate, though he was already starting to lose his appetite.

    “They’d already cut the deal,” Lassiter said. “I watched them huddle together earlier in the case. Juror 10 agreed to nominate Seven for chairperson. They probably had two or three others with committed votes.”

    “Just like
Survivor,
” Jason said. Sometimes it was discouraging to watch jurors operate.

    “The point,” Lassiter responded, “is that Juror 7 was dead set against you from the start and looking for a way to control the deliberations.”

    Jason hunkered down with his pizza, soda, and black notebook. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to have access to this tape of the deliberations. But after a few months at Justice Inc., he had befriended Andrew Lassiter, the man who shouldered the ultimate responsibility for making the prediction about the real case based on the shadow jury results.

    Each time Justice Inc. targeted a major case, Lassiter watched the entire deliberation process for every shadow jury. He often stayed up most of the night after the juries returned their verdicts, analyzing and reanalyzing. He was the mastermind behind the entire system—the inventor of the micromarketing software at the core of the company’s process. His mind was a rare blend of scientific genius and psychological insight.

    A year ago, Jason had pleaded for the chance to join Lassiter while he analyzed one of the panels, arguing that it could enhance Jason’s own trial skills and give Lassiter some company. Lassiter eventually broke down, though he swore Jason to secrecy. The two men hit it off instantly—Lassiter as the laser-focused professor, Jason as the studious trial lawyer—brought together by their insatiable desire to scrutinize the dynamics of jury deliberations.

    After a few trials, the review process had developed its own quirky routine—like a private premiere party. They discussed the things that worked for Jason and the things he could have done differently. They talked about the idiosyncrasies of each juror and whether anything peculiar had happened in the mock case that might skew the results. After a night of reviewing the video, Lassiter would have a final meeting with a team of other analysts and then call Robert Sherwood with a consensus prediction for the real case.