Schneier on Security

Roger • March 1, 2006 5:25 PM

When I read the subject line, I thought it was going to be about "identity thieves" impersonating real jurors in order to pervert the course of justice.

I've served on two juries, and in neither case do I recall anyone checking my identity at the courthouse. If someone had stolen my summons from the letterbox, turned up at the courthouse saying "yep, I'm Roger", and been able to give sensible answers to a few basic questions from the lawyers, no-one would have been any the wiser. Having even one juror on their team, as a spy, would give a considerable advantage in argument, as well as facilitating jury tampering. Three would usually be sufficient to force a favourable verdict on all but the most open-and-shut cases.

You'd probably need an informer or other security breach at the courthouse to know which electors are going to be impanelled, but otherwise it would be pretty easy, at least for minor cases where the lawyers aren't going to use PIs to check your "voir dire" answers. (Actually, I think it's only defendant's lawyers who do that, so if the attack is being made by the defendant then you're completely safe.) The main difficulty is that usually there are several times more electors impanelled than jurors selected, and the rest just get a lunch voucher and then sent home. You would need to get quite a few agents onto the panel to get a good chance of one making it into the jury.

In my country, I believe the press aren't supposed to publish the names of jurors. However even if they do so, they are very unlikely to publish name AND address, so no-one will be alerted unless the attacker foolishly chooses a juror with a very unusual name. In fact a resourceful attacker may even be able to substitute a juror with another person with a very similar name, so even if the ruse is detected it can all be blamed on the Post Office.

Roger • March 2, 2006 7:34 PM

@David Frier:

> There are enough random factors in jury selection

True, it wouldn't be trivial. But an unscrupulous person facing, say, a 50:50 chance of either 5 years in prison or walking away scot free, might consider it to be worth a considerable effort and substantial money.

> from 5 to 30 fraudsters per day (jury selection doesn't always happen on quite the day one might predict)

That's true, but not very relevant, because the same panel (typically about 60 persons) is kept for the entire selection period. So basically all your stooge needs to do is avoid being selected for the wrong jury. There are a lot of well known tricks to help with that.

At least that's how it works around here, different places might do it differently; however getting a new panel every day would be an administrative nightmare, and an order of magnitude more expensive.

> to be reasonably sure of getting one on the targeted jury.

The probabilities aren't quite as hard as you seem to think. To avoid boring everyone I won't give the calculations unless asked, but basically with a typical rate of challenging (say, 1 in 3), the probability of getting at least one stooge onto the jury reaches 50% with just two in a panel of 60, and climbs quickly from there. If there will be two juries selected at the same session with yours second, you challenge one in three, and you have 5 stooges in the panel, then there is a 91% chance of getting at least one of your guys onto the jury, and a 60% chance of more than 1.

@Nick Lancaster:
> Furthermore, the only thing a fake juror could hope to do is hang the jury,

Not so, there are many valuable ways to use such a stooge:
* Spy on the jury room to help target arguments
* Argue your side in the jury room, including arguments not permissible in court itself
* Identify problem jurors who might be coerced or corrupted
* Warn the defence when to plea bargain or throw in the towel for leniency if they have no chance
* When majority verdicts are permitted, 2 stooges or 1 and an influenced juror can potentially switch all the way to "not guilty"
* Replace all the coffee with decaf -- except his own.
* The night before the prosecution sums up, spike the last coffee of the day with No-Doz. Decaf again in the morning.
* After dead-locking the jury, and everyone is tired and fed-up, horse-trade votes -- agree to switch to "guilty" on the one charge that he secretly knows will get a powerful mitigating argument in the sentencing phase.

> in which case his identity might come under further scrutiny,

Very unlikely -- it is a serious criminal offence to disclose how individual jurors voted.