The Justice Game Read online

  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 For the first time in three days, the large screen on which the jurors had been viewing the proceedings had been replaced by live participants.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.”

  7

  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.
r />   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.

  “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.”

  8

  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 a
n 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.