This is a real world example of a question I’ve always had: if someone attempts to bribe you by giving you money up-front with the promise of more later, but, like in this instance, you turn around and report it, do you get to keep the money after reporting the attempted bribe?
The article says they handed it over to police (I’m assuming as evidence of a crime), but I’m wondering if there’s any legal precedent for them getting the money back after the trial is over. It seems like it’d be advantageous to allow people to keep the money in cases like this.
If you’re forced to relinquish the money, then there’s an incentive for the juror to keep the money (at the risk of criminal charges) and you have to hope that the juror’s sense of morality is able to overcome the cash temptation. $120k is a lot of money and would probably pose a significant moral dilemma for most people in this economy.
However, if the juror is allowed to keep it after the trial is over, then there’s no downside for the juror to report it. There’s no moral dilemma because they get to keep the cash for doing the right thing. If anything, there’s an incentive for the juror to report it because then the cash is no longer illegal so there’s no longer a criminal risk to keeping it and the prosecution gets evidence for another crime to hit the defense with. The alternative is keeping the cash at the risk of being caught and thrown in jail.
Edit: tried to rephrase the question to make it a bit clearer.
Someone willing to pay a juror a $120k bribe is probably also willing to kill a juror who takes the bag of cash and doesn’t keep their end of the deal.
Keeping the money and not keeping the deal is a no-win for the juror. Best case scenario, you sleep on your $120k with one eye open for the rest of your stressed out life.
They’re also the kind of people to kill you after you complete your end of the bargain and take the money back.
I mean, is giving the money to the cops in a report, or even giving the money back, much safer? If they’re offering bribe money, they clearly value your cooperation more than the money and so might not be willing to take no for an answer if you try to refuse or give it back in person. I guess with the reporting option, there’s at least the fact that if something happens to you, it’s going to look far more suspicious than if you were just someone the media and law enforcement had never heard of, so whoever gave the bribe risks even worse crimes potentially being tied to them with the murder.
What do you think they’d do to someone who turns the money over and snitches? There’s no available sure win.
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Pretty sure the government keeps the money.
If the juror is allowed to keep the money after the trial if they report it, just means we will have open bribery of jurors.
“Yes, I got this $100,000 cashier check to vote guilty, so I’m going to vote not guilty to keep the $100,000”
You let them keep it as a reward for doing the right thing and reporting, but you also replace them in the jury.
So you can replace a juror of your choice for a bag of cash?
Apparently you can do that already since this juror was removed. Also it sounds expensive with very little reward
Not to mention it involves directly implicating yourself in a new crime (or several, since it would be both bribery as well as jury tampering). And it would be more evidence of guilt.
I think the only downside to this is that if I had expendable cash already liquid so no paper trail, and I was a juror, and I wanted the defendant to get in even more trouble, I could claim the cash was a bribe and get it back with no risk. It would also make laundering money easier as any claim of bribery instantly cleans up the source of it. And if the designated grunt does his time and doesn’t talk, it never gets traced back to the source.
Easy for me to say over a screen, but if I knew the person was guilty and it was a serious thing, I’d tell them to take that 120k and shove it up their ass, or better yet, do what this person did and call them out on their bullshit tactics.
It’s the prisoner’s dilemma but one sided, and with bribe money.
That’s you report that they attempted to bribe you with a lesser amount and pocket the difference.
$100k in money can go a long way in changing an everyday person’s life.
So, fraud?
The juror should have said it was $100,000.
What, you mean this bag of 80k that somebody dropped at my door? No idea where it came from
I’m shocked that you’d think that any amount of money, even 60k, would get me to compromise my civic duty.
40k is only a years salary for me so idk why they thought that would be anywhere near enough.
This 20k would have really helped me out, but alas, morals.
Somebody suggested that I’d get some money, but I never did. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for an appointment at the Ferrari dealership.
This was all beautiful, thank you everyone that pulled through
You’re beautiful.
120k is barely a down payment on a Ferrari.
Definitely not true for a sweet used one
apparently our 20k increments played well on Boing Boing . We did it guys!
Finally, we’re famous.
How do they expect to sway a juror for only $5k?
What bag?
Seriously? You expect me to compromise my morals for 50k?
Or just take the money and still prosecute and never mention the money.
Someone handed out $120,000? wow, I hope they find that money
I have a feeling that one would be swiftly dispatched in this sort of instance.
The kinds of people that hand you $120,000 in exchange for criminal behavior aren’t the kinds of people to just shrug their shoulders and be okay with you stealing it.
Take it, gaslight yourself that it doesn’t exist, finish the trial, buy a weeks worth of groceries
I don’t think shopping at Whole Foods would be a good use of that money. The asparagus water just isn’t worth it, you can make it at home.
Why assume it didn’t start as $250k before it got to the news?
If I was the juror in a case of this scale, with all of the political people involved, I would be scared shitless that it was a setup by cops or some other party. I would assume I had been videoed taking the money and would run immediately to hand over every penny.
I figure that once you admit to someone trying to bribe you, that someone’s finances will probably be investigated, and if it seems like they really gave you bunch more and you lied about the amount, that’s potential trouble for you.
You lied or the guy giving you the money took his percentage.
Who are you more likely to believe? The one reporting the crime or the one that committed it?
They’re convicted felons for the crime of fraud. Of course they’re going to try to commit more fraud about how much money they offered you.
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In a fraud trial
Chef’s kiss
There should be a law that states that if this happens and you turn them in then you get to keep the money.
Shouldn’t the one person who absolutely should be on the jury be the person reporting a bribery attempt?
No, because they’re automatically biased against the defendant. The goal is no bias, regardless of reason.
Declining a bribe makes you automatically biased? Huh?
Yes.
Even if I believed someone were innocent, if someone attempted to purchase my vote, I would be personally offended, and immediately view the defendant as untrustworthy. It would bias my judgement.The article states that the judge removed the jury member from the case and swapped in an alternate. The judge is also sequestering the jury, so they must spend the remainder of the case in a hotel - hopefully avoiding any other attempts to bias the jury.
Elmo has no idea how juror selection works.
Your comment requires elaboration.
What happened here was jury tampering, and it occurred after jury selection.
How would jury selection factor in?
Personally, I think the bias caused by attempting to bribe a member of the jury would be entirely fair. It should be used as further evidence of guilt in the trial itself. Even if they are innocent of the original charges, they are corrupt and I can’t say I have any problem with removing power from such corruption.
All I know is those horrible people are not guilty. Waiting for my bag of money any moment now.
Why do outsiders have access to jurors in the first place? Was the jury not sequestered?
So the bribe was $240,000, you say?
The article is light on details around the actual cash itself but I have to wonder if it wasn’t counterfeit. If you are, without any type of conversation, randomly trying to pay off jurors that seems like a lot of real money to just blindly throw at the problem and hope it goes away.
Even $5k or $10k could be a life-changing amount of money for some people, seems like it would be easier/cheaper to start there (if it’s real) then promise more on a specific outcome.
It’s not like your average person would be able to tell a real from a fake bill…
Your lawyers know quite a bit about the jurors, including economic status. You scale your bribes to the general income range.
C’mon, man… this is bribery 101.
I flunked out of crime school and never got past remedial bribery.
They’re keeping the jury, that’s a bad idea. Who knows if anyone accepted.
