The Justice Game (6 page)

    “Why didn’t you tell
us
about Juror 7’s husband?” Jason asked.

    “You know the rules. You only get access to the same data that the real lawyers have.”

    “They don’t know about the affair?”

    “I don’t think so. Juror 7 and her husband agreed on a property distribution without going to trial. Cited irreconcilable differences. Neither likes to talk about the real reason.”

    “I would have argued the case differently.”

    “I should hope so.” Lassiter popped open his second can of beer, blinked at the screen a few times, and took a long swallow. By now he had a nervous bounce going with his left leg—the carbs burning up as soon as they entered his system.

    “How did
you
find out about the affair?” Jason asked. He knew Justice Inc. maintained a slew of investigators who looked under every rock when compiling the micromarketing profiles for the citizens who had been selected for jury duty during the term of the case in question. The investigators checked each juror’s trash—technically not a crime since it was abandoned property. Often they gained access to a juror’s computer files through some genius hacker who reported directly to Andrew Lassiter. A handful of jurors would agree to a telephone survey Justice Inc. conducted under the guise of a time-share company promising a free round-trip airline ticket just for participating. There were rumors of more nefarious methods as well, though they were never discussed in Jason’s presence.

    “We know lots of things,” Lassiter said, picking up another wing.

    “You have guys following the jurors?”

    Lassiter gave Jason a look, out of the top of his eyes, with just a hint of annoyance. They had been over this before—there were some things Jason could never know.

    “Okay,” Jason said. “I’m just saying, it’s hard to believe that Juror 7’s husband had an affair, and the actual lawyers trying the case, with their own high-priced jury consultants, don’t even know about it.”

    “Please,” Lassiter said. “You might as well hire a palm reader and just skip the so-called jury consultants. They don’t hire real investigators. They just hazard wild guesses based on the same information everybody has. What they do is roulette. What we do is science.”

    For the next hour and a half, Jason watched the tape with Lassiter, occasionally checking a juror’s profile information. As usual, Lassiter provided insightful commentary, tying the remarks of the jurors to the data in their profiles. He stopped at three beers and left his plate of half-eaten chicken wings on the table, his leg bouncing, eyes blinking, working on a spreadsheet the entire time the jurors argued—his screen split between a window showing the deliberations and the spreadsheets that predicted their outcome.

    Eventually Jason cleaned off the table and put the leftovers in Lassiter’s refrigerator. His friend stayed hunched over his computer, massaging the data even as he talked to Jason and listened to the jurors prattle on.

    After two hours of deliberations, Juror 7 decided it was time to take another vote. This would be the fourth or fifth vote—Jason had lost count—and each time the number of jurors in favor of acquittal had increased by one or two.

    “Eight to four in favor of acquittal,” Juror 7 announced after a quick show of hands. There were a few groans from the ones who had been in favor of acquittal from the start. They had obviously been hoping for a few more converts.

    During the last hour of the video, Jason watched helplessly as Juror 7 and her comrades tore apart his case and bullied the other jurors. He had an answer for every question, but he would never get to voice them.

    In two years, he had never lost a case at Justice Inc. Not a single shadow jury had turned against him. But now it was happening right in front of his eyes, and he couldn’t think of a single thing he could have done differently to prevent it.

    “The prosecution’s going to lose, aren’t they?” Jason asked, referring to the real case.

    “Why do you say that?” Lassiter stood for the first time in two hours and stretched. “You won two of the three panels.”

    “But Austin Lockhart’s not much of a trial lawyer. And Juror 7 is on a mission from God. Nobody had better accuse a jilted wife of murder… not on her watch.”

    “She’s a little out of control,” Lassiter admitted. He blinked and cleared his throat. “But you won the other two panels, so it obviously wasn’t as much of a factor there. Personally, I’m more concerned about the Jason Noble factor.”

    Jason knew it was intended as a compliment—a reference to his superior advocacy skills and whether they had skewed the results. Jason didn’t put much stock in it himself. He was certainly better than Lockhart, but not enough to completely alter the outcome.

    “I glanced at the beginnings of the other deliberations before you got here,” Lassiter said. “The other juries were nearly unanimous for a conviction right from the start. Sure, you out-lawyered Lockhart, but you had more to work with. Nine times out of ten, Kendra Van Wyck is going to jail.”

    “I don’t know,” Jason said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”

    “That’s the point. You operate on feelings. I operate on facts.”

Robert Sherwood and his guests grilled steaks and drank wine for nearly two hours aboard his sixty-eight-foot yacht,
Veritas,
being careful not to discuss any business until they were beyond the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. Sherwood constantly reminded his guests that they were doing nothing illegal, but you never knew when some headline-grabbing prosecutor would think of a creative new way to twist the law and go after you, based on the theory that nobody should make this much money without a little hassle from the feds.

    Sherwood’s guests each represented a major hedge fund. They were part of an exclusive club of Wall Street boy geniuses, a few of the lucky survivors who had bet on a bear market even before the collapse. But it was still Sherwood who dominated the conversation, holding forth on politics, baseball, Manhattan real estate, golf, and yachting—just about anything the great man wanted to talk about. Except business—that could wait until later.

    Sherwood was fifteen years older than the oldest guest and outweighed most of them by at least twenty pounds. The man wore his years well, and people routinely expressed surprise when they learned he was pushing sixty. He dyed his hair, bleached his teeth, and worked out every day. He stood six-two and weighed a solid 210 pounds, the same weight he had carried in law school nearly thirty-five years earlier. Sherwood was loud and confident and generally found a way of mentioning his black belt within a half hour of meeting someone new.

    He knew that two of his guests would never cross him, never dare to argue with a Robert Sherwood recommendation. But then there was Felix McDermont. McDermont was the most unimposing man in the room—slender and soft-spoken with feminine features and wire-rimmed glasses, protruding cheekbones that made him look like a POW, and teeth too large for his mouth. He always aggravated Sherwood with a persistent list of innocent-sounding questions, but Sherwood kept inviting him back because McDermont routinely made the biggest investment of any of Sherwood’s clients. And once McDermont made his play, a dozen other hedge funds would follow suit within twenty-four hours.

    Plus, he had one other endearing trait. Every time he made a hundred million or so for his fund, McDermont donated generously to Sherwood’s current philanthropic cause, which at this moment happened to be the AIDS epidemic in Kenya. Sherwood could put up with a lot of nonsense for someone as generous as McDermont.

    At 2:30, Sherwood led his guests into the ornate main cabin area, pulled out his laptop, and hit a switch that caused a large television screen to rise out of a cabinet. The hedge fund operators poured themselves stiff drinks from the bar—they knew their way around—and settled into the plush leather furniture. All but McDermont, who quietly drank water and sat on a barstool, his laptop open on the bar in front of him.

    Sherwood turned on the cabin lights and lowered the power blinds on the windows. He lit a fat stogie—not an expensive imported brand but a blue-collar Phillies cigar manufactured in the City of Brotherly Love—and pulled up a PowerPoint presentation that had been prepared by Andrew Lassiter. Sherwood roamed the cabin as he talked, blowing smoke and stopping occasionally for a nice long pull on the cigar, pointing with the lit end to emphasize his arguments.

    Sherwood had done this drill forty-one times before. He had correctly predicted the winner in thirty-four cases, and five other cases had settled during trial. He had been wrong only twice. One of those times, in the early days of Justice Inc., had nearly bankrupted the startup operation.

    As of today, Sherwood was on a nineteen-case win streak. Each win further emboldened his clients, causing them to raise their bets on subsequent cases. Sherwood would never know exactly how much each hedge fund gambled, but on a big case like the Van Wyck trial, with the ripple effects that might impact a number of different companies, a savvy hedge fund operator could easily put a hundred million dollars at play without raising suspicions. With the right jury verdict, Sherwood’s investors would double their money.

    For thirty minutes, Sherwood bored the men with background information they already knew—the charges against Van Wyck, the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the lawyers, general information about the jurors. The real trial had started four days earlier, and the lawyers had estimated it would take three weeks to finish. Public opinion was split on who was winning—a perfect scenario for Justice Inc.’s advanced research techniques.

    The hedge fund operators listened patiently. Felix McDermont typed as fast as Sherwood spoke, recording every detail, presumably so he could scrutinize it later. The other guests didn’t need details—they just wanted the bottom line.

    Sherwood walked over to a glass bowl containing mixed nuts, picked out a few cashews, and munched on them before calling up a new slide. This one featured information about Juror 7, including complete details about her husband’s affair.

    “How good are your sources?” McDermont asked without looking up.

    “We used Rafael Johansen’s company, same as every other case.”

    McDermont made a note. Johansen’s information could be trusted.

    The next slide was the clincher, the reason each firm in the room paid Justice Inc. nearly $150,000 apiece, enough to recoup every dime of the company’s cost for the mock trials.

    “Two out of three shadow juries returned a guilty verdict,” Sherwood said. He paused, allowing this information to sink in. Justice Inc. typically made recommendations only when all three shadow juries reached the same result. He watched the disappointment register on his guests’ faces. “But we think the third jury is an aberration, driven by Juror 7’s emotional connection with the defendant. In hindsight, we think Juror 7 on the third shadow panel has a much stronger personality than Juror 7 on the actual jury. We’re prepared to predict a guilty verdict despite the outcome of the third shadow panel.”

    “Doesn’t the scientific evidence favor the defense?” McDermont asked. “Jurors hate to ignore CSI evidence these days.”

    Sherwood agreed but took the next several minutes to talk about the holes in the hair testing evidence, weaknesses that had been exposed by Jason Noble. He showed a video of Jason’s cross-examination of a toxicologist who was playing the role of Dr. Kramer. By the time Jason finished, it was clear to everyone except Felix McDermont where the case was headed.

    “I watched the prosecutor’s opening statement and examination of the first few witnesses,” McDermont said. “Frankly, I wasn’t that impressed. From what I’ve just seen of your man’s cross-examination, he may be better than the actual prosecutors, invalidating the results.”

    It was a good point—and one that troubled Sherwood as well. The previous night, he had argued with Andrew Lassiter for nearly two hours.
Maybe we just need to be patient. Juror 7 worries me. Jason Noble is better than the actual prosecutors. And maybe Austin Lockhart isn’t as good as the actual defense lawyers. Seventy-five million is a lot to put on the line when we have split results from our juries.

    But Lassiter had been insistent. He had verified this sixteen different ways, he said. The third shadow jury was an aberration. There were no guarantees, but this one was close to 90 percent.

    He had eventually sold Sherwood, who that morning had authorized the investment of seventy-five million dollars in short sales and put options on various companies that would be hurt if Van Wyck was found guilty. Seventy-five million of Justice Inc.’s own money! It was too late to turn back now.

    Sherwood calmly took another drag on his cigar.

    McDermont spoke into the silence. “I don’t like the prosecution’s theory of the case. They don’t understand the scientific evidence. I’ve looked at their credentials. They aren’t used to trying circumstantial cases like this.”

    This was what Sherwood hated about McDermont. Sherwood had been a successful trial lawyer. He had an instinct for juries. McDermont had probably never seen the inside of a courtroom. “Do you want me to send one of our trial lawyers over to your company so they can give you advice on natural gas futures?” Sherwood asked.

    McDermont stopped typing, crossed his arms and leaned back on his bar stool.

    “We’ve tried dozens of these cases,” Sherwood said, meeting his stare. “This is our area of expertise. If we’re not sure, we don’t come to you with a recommendation.”

    “Give me a percentage,” McDermont said.

    “Ninety,” Sherwood said.

    McDermont thought it over.

    The silence was broken when two of the hedge fund managers pronounced themselves in. Even in the midst of the Wall Street turmoil, Justice Inc.’s predictions had generated enviable returns and earned their trust.

    “What about you?” Sherwood asked McDermont.