My Experience as a Juror

Below is an email I sent to my friends and family in September, 2006 after serving a week week of Jury duty in Arlington County, VA. The sentencing phase occurs tomorrow and I will follow-up with another post of the results.
———————
Last week I was a juror for a week-long Arlington county felony fraud case. The experience both left me a bit paranoid for my own privacy and identity as well as generally pleased with the fairness of the judicial process.

The case involved credit card and identity theft. An organized crime ring traveled to different health clubs in the DC metro region. They entered locker rooms and picked the locks of lockers where people had stowed their possessions while exercising. After entering the lockers they systematically swiped all of the credit cards into a reader and recorded the name, credit card number, and expiration date onto a laptop. They then return the wallet, locked the lockers, and ran off with the information.

The net result of this crime was that they had successful stolen all of the credit cards and the owner never knew it happened! So the owners never had the opportunity to cancel their cards.

The defendant traveled to Arlington from New York City on September 20th, 2005 in attempt to buy as much electronics with the stolen cards as possible before heading back to New York . He systematically visited the Apple stores in Clarendon, Tysons, and Pentagon City to buy $2000 laptops with the stolen cards. As you’ll see, these are sophisticated schemes.

For over a year he personally obtained credit cards from every bank that would give him one. Every month or so he would report them lost or stolen and get a new card. Thus after 6 months or so he had dozens of new credit cards with his name on them.

He arrived in Arlington with these credit cards and bought black-market CDs with the credit card data stolen from the gyms. He then proceeded to reprogram his card with the new names and numbers. He programmed the cards such that the data transmitted to the bank would have the stolen name, expiration, date, card number, and other personal information of the victim’s cards while the receipt would print out his name which matched the front of the card exactly. He went to great pains to make sure stolen MC numbers were put on his MC cards, Visa on Visa, etc. so that the first four numbers matched. He also tried to match up the last four numbers on his cards with the last 4 numbers on the stolen cards wherever possible so the receipts would not arouse suspicion.

How did he get caught? He was pulled over for speeding 6 MPH over the limit on Glebe road by a rookie traffic cop. After running his license the cop was alerted that he was wanted in another state and arrested him. As a result of painstaking effort by the Arlington detectives and the media forensics department they were able to unravel the situation.

After hearing 4 days of testimony from banks, victims, and police, we spent a day pouring through a mountain of paperwork and found him guilty of 53 out of 54 counts of credit card theft, credit card forgery, identity theft, and possession of burglarious tools. Several of my fellow jurors did not really understand how the crime ring worked, so I took them step-by-step through the process (the defense attorney – while grasping at straws – had attempted to create a smokescreen of confusion about what was happening on the laptop).

Interestingly enough, in Arlington county the jury also assigns punishment for the crimes. I had to lobby pretty hard with some of my fellow jurors who didn’t really see why identity theft was so bad. On at least one of the counts I was determined to make sure the guy got 5 years of imprisonment. Arlington has no parole.

In the end we reached a compromise and handed out 1-5 years imprisonment on every charge. The judge will ultimately decide sentencing and determine if the sentences are served consecutively or concurrently.

I left the experience feeling reasonably good about our judicial system. I will also NEVER leave my wallet locked in a public place. I also can’t figure out why the defense attorneys let a guy with 15 years of IT experience sit on a jury where the prosecution’s entire case was based on circumstantial evidence collected from laptops, cellphones, and other electronic media.

Follow Kevin on Twitter