A juror was dismissed Monday after reporting that a woman dropped a bag of $120,000 in cash at her home and offered her more money if she would vote to acquit seven people charged with stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic. “This is completely beyond the pale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court on Monday. During the trial that began in April, defense attorneys questioned the quality of the FBI's investigation and suggested that this might be more of a case of record-keeping problems than fraud as these defendants sought to keep up with rapidly changing rules for the food aid program.
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.
That’s why you give the cops one of the $120K bags you were bribed with, and keep the other two.
What are the bribers going to say, “hey, that’s only a third of what I tried to bribe them with!”…?
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Not necessarily. Trump asked his fixer to bring this bag with legit money. Trump will reimburse his lawyer later as legal fees.
Is he still finding people who fall for this old scam?
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.
Pretty sure the government keeps the money.
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.
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.
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?