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.
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.