It is time for jury selection in The Lincoln Lawyer season 1 episode 5 ‘Twelve Lemmings in a Box’ on Netflix.
The Lincoln Lawyer: Case File for season 1 episode 5
‘Twelve Lemmings in a Box’
Written by Andi Bushell
Directed by Bill D’Eliah
Jury selection in the Trevor Elliott trial has arrived. Mickey schools the audience on the many strategies and tools related to jury selection. Maggie struggles to keep her case alive when the DA seems to care more about the upcoming election.
Cisco takes measures to draw out another possible suspect to blame while some visitors from his past ask Mickey for a favor. We learn a little more about Lorna’s past as well.
Detective Griggs grows more concerned about a large transaction on Jerry Vincent’s account.
Let us investigate further our case file for The Lincoln Lawyer S1E5 ‘Twelve Lemmings in a Box”.
Refresh your memory:
- Angelo Soto has been indicted on human trafficking charges. He is accused of using Filipino immigrants as slave labor in his nursing care facilities.
- Jan Rilz was the yoga instructor that Lara Elliott was seeing outside of her marriage to Trevor Elliott. Rilz was murdered alongside Lara at the beach house on September 6.
- Neema Shavar was another married woman with whom Jan Rilz was having a relationship. Neema is now divorced from Anton Shavar who owns a private security firm.
The pool
Mickey is in the mood for a hot dog and wants to give Trevor a sense of the wide demographic from which the jury will be selected. This lands them at famous Pink’s Hot Dogs in Ventura.
Mickey refers to the crowd surrounding the restaurant as Trevor’s jury pool. He points out that Trevor’s Fiskers car is worth more than 5 times the average person’s salary. Trevor finally agrees to drive his late wife’s Prius to trial instead.
Mickey needs Trevor’s agreement on something else as well. He asks Trevor to sign the agreement with the jury consultant for hire. Trevor stops Mickey in his tracks and flatly refuses to sign.
Trevor insists that he is a good judge of people, a trait that has helped him build his business. He plans to participate in all the selection decisions. Mickey tries one more time to offer the services of the jury consultant reminding Trevor that he has been picking juries for a long time.
The answer is still no as Trevor tears up the agreement.
Workaround
Izzy drives Mickey to The Viper Room where he goes upstairs to watch a high stakes poker game in progress. He is there to speak with the woman named Gwen who wins the game. She and Mickey are clearly already friends. Since Trevor will not allow Mickey to hire a jury consultant, Mickey does the next best, or maybe even better, thing.
Mickey asks Gwen to attend the selection process and feed Mickey intel about jurors who are lying, bluffing, and generally not representing themselves truthfully. She agrees and Mickey lets her know that their arrangement must be kept secret from his client.
Cherry
Mickey is on a mission to find the witness that disappeared in the Jesus Menendez trial. He wants to find her so she could testify at a habeas hearing to re-examine Jesus’ verdict. She is a prostitute that goes by the name of Glory Days.
With the location of Glory Days unknown, Mickey lures a prostitute named Cherry to a hotel phone using a burner number. Cherry is surprised to find him there and begins yelling at him for bailing on his promise to help with her drug charge if she searched for Glory Days.
Mickey explains his accident and recovery that pulled him away from the original search for Glory Days. He gives Cherry some cash asking her to resume the search for his key witness. She reluctantly obliges and offers additional services. Mickey declines and tells her to keep the room for the balance of the hour.
Jury selection begins
The next couple of days center around the jury selection for Trevor’s trial. We first see the potential jurors watching a video of Judge Holder explaining the jury process.
Inside the courtroom, Golantz and his colleague have a computer app that will store juror data and essentially automate the decision-making process. At the other table, Mickey prepares his paper system for making those decisions, an array of different colored markers and sticky notes on a paper grid.
Golantz pokes fun at Mickey for his old school methodology, but Mickey claims nothing beats the human interpretation of a juror’s answers. Mickey’s poker friend Gwen sits in the gallery and texts him a note of encouragement.
A crash course in jury selection
Over the next two days, the defense and prosecution narrow the jury pool to 12 jurors and 2 alternates. What occurs in between is a peek inside the many factors, rules and tools used in selecting a jury.
Sometimes we see Mickey in dialogue with Izzy on the long desert road. Other times it may be Mickey explaining something to Trevor. Or the rules may be explained by a sidebar the attorneys have with Judge Stanton.
Here are some of the key points demonstrated throughout the process:
- Jurors cannot give personal identifying information when answering questions. When one potential juror shares her first name, she is immediately dismissed.
- Each side is looking for particular biases in jurors while trying to avoid others.
- Each side gets 10 challenges. They can each dismiss 10 different jurors without explanation. Other potential jurors take their places until the number is reduced to 12 plus 2 alternates.
- Each attorney gets to introduce their case and ask questions of the jury pool.
- The judge can dismiss someone for cause without the use of an attorney challenge. Mickey asks questions of one juror trying to reveal an obvious bias, He hopes the judge will dismiss the juror in lieu of him having to use one of his challenges. Judge Stanton is on to him and says he will not make the dismissal for him.
- There is something called a Wheeler motion where an attorney can claim the other side is using discrimination in their selection process. Mickey attempts this with Golantz. Stanton does not act upon it, but it is enough to make Golantz hesitant to pick another female. It just so happens that Mickey wants this female dismissed but wants to save his challenges.
- The second morning Lorna somehow procures a juror sticker and searches vehicles in the juror parking lot for evidence of bias like bumper stickers and other identifying factors. I am pretty certain this is a violation. She reports back to Mickey that she finds it strange that a juror who is an engineer would be driving such a messy car.
- The engineer juror (#7) comes up again when Trevor wants to dismiss him rather than a female juror (#10). Mickey is not convinced that is the correct thing to do.
- Lorna interrupts the selection proceedings to bring Mickey a folder, which is essentially empty. Mickey claims there is an urgent personal matter he needs to address. The judge offers a short break. Mickey leaves his juror notes open on the table. As Mickey suspects he will, Golantz peeks at Mickey’s notes and tries to use the information against him. Little does Golantz know that Mickey planted the notation in hopes that Golantz would act upon it. Golantz dismisses the juror he thinks Mickey wants, but instead he is playing right into Mickey’s hands.
- The disagreement about juror 7 versus 10 is eliminated when the judge receives a note saying juror 10 felt like Trevor was following her in the parking garage. Trevor insists that he was just walking around having a difficult time finding the Prius because he does not normally drive it. The judge does not dismiss juror 10, but Mickey knows he must now dismiss #10 since she has a negative impression of Trevor. Trevor gets his wish that juror #7, the engineer with the messy car, remains on the jury. This concludes jury selection.
The poker player actively shares her feedback throughout the process texting Mickey which jurors she thinks are lying. She studies the jurors carefully looking for physical signs of lying or discomfort. She even tells Mickey that she sees Trevor has a habit of rubbing his leg when he is uncomfortable or nervous about something.
Lorna sees old classmate
A young man calls to Lorna in the hall outside the courtroom. He reminds her that they shared a torts class at Southwestern Law School.
Wait, Lorna was in law school? The fellow student named Ryan recalls how smart Lorna was and wonders why she left school. Lorna struggles to give an excuse and simply refers to life and work as the reason. She tells Ryan she needs to go.
Election woes
Maggie’s boss, Janelle Simmons, is running for District Attorney against a candidate named Robert Cardone who, of course, is running negative ads about Janelle. Janelle tells Maggie that all cases need to be bulletproof.
Maggie’s case hit a major setback when her primary witness, David Loresca, was recently murdered. Janelle is skeptical about pursuing the case. Maggie insists that the defendant Angelo Soto is behind Loresca’s murder, not a carjacking.
If they can prove that Soto is responsible for Loresca’s murder, they can still use the grand jury testimony of the deceased witness. Janelle agrees to move forward if Maggie can prove Soto planned David’s demise. Otherwise, she is considering dropping the human trafficking charges all together.
Law and order
Lankford and Maggie team up to identify a plan for exposing Soto for the hit on their star witness. The detective mentions the name of Soto’s girlfriend, Tanya Cruz. A little research shows that Tanya is originally from the Philippines and was not wealthy before her involvement with Soto.
They hope to find some leverage to use against Tanya, so that she will testify to Soto’s involvement in Loresca’s death. A bit of super-sleuthing uncovers a photo of Soto and Tanya leaving an OB/GYN office together. Maggie surmises that Tanya is pregnant.
Lankford and Maggie approach Tanya Cruz as she puts shopping bags in her car. They tell her that they know she is pregnant with Soto’s baby. Tanya has completed her first trimester.
Maggie talks about Tanya’s name being on some of Soto’s accounts. This will tie Tanya to his misdeeds, and she could land in jail pregnant and unable to keep her baby. Tanya claims she is not familiar with Soto’s business dealings.
Maggie says it is in her favor if she does have information to leverage. She tells her it is dangerous to talk to anyone but an attorney and offers her Mickey’s card.
Izzy’s Ex
We learn a little more about Izzy’s background when she speaks on the phone in frustration. Mickey leaves the courthouse and hears her getting off the phone. He wants to make sure she is okay. She says she was talking to her ex-girlfriend named Rae.
Izzy is worried about some photos from Rae that make Izzy think she is using drugs. She feels responsible having been the one to get Rae into drugs in the first place.
An uncomfortable visit
Just as Izzy and Mickey are planning to leave, a motorcycle gang rides up in front of the Lincoln. A rider named Ted approaches Mickey about helping one of their members named Hard Case Casey with a parole issue. Mickey agrees and Ted mentions Cisco. We get the impression that this is the Cisco’s old gang.
Mickey returns to the Lincoln and Izzy asks Mickey if he is indebted to the gang. Mickey agrees there is a reason he feels like he must help them.
Cisco’s manicure
Speaking of Cisco, he conveniently goes for a manicure at the same nail salon that Neema Shavar is visiting. Neema is another one of the clients that Jan Rilz was seeing “privately”.
Cisco makes small talk about pedicures and then brings up her relationship with Rilz and the restraining order Rilz took out on her ex-husband. Cisco advises Neema to prepare to answer questions for the murder trial, suggesting her ex could be the killer.
Neema emphatically tells Cisco to leave her alone, but Cisco knows he upset her just enough to tell her ex about the incident.
Anton Shavar makes a threat
Sure enough, Anton Shavar shows up at Cisco’s place and harasses him for confronting his wife, er ex-wife. Anton threatens Cisco if he ever speaks to Neema again and gives Cisco a peek inside his coat jacket revealing a gun and holster.
Later we learn that during Cisco’s sewing project earlier in the day, he was adding a tiny hidden camera to his jacket that looks a button. Cisco now has Anton’s threat on video ready for Mickey to use if needed.
Mickey visits Maggie
Mickey stops by Maggie’s house after the jury is locked in for the Elliott trial. He has been trying to reach her about their close encounter the other night. Maggie apologizes for not getting back to him sooner.
Maggie insists that she was not in her right mind when she almost kissed him. He flirts with her saying she seemed like herself to him. Before Mickey leaves, she tells him wants to ask him for a favor. He agrees and she says she will share the details the next day.
Griggs surprises Mickey
Mickey makes his way home and is about to open his front door when he hears someone come up behind and startles him. It is Griggs who has approached him.
Griggs tells Mickey that Jerry Vincent withdrew $150,000 in cash within a couple months of his murder. Vincent claimed it was to purchase a boat, but Griggs cannot find any boat registered to Jerry. Between the cash and a record of calls with the FBI, Griggs tells Mickey that he is worried that the money was for a bribe.
Sidebar:
Who’s jury selection tool do you think is better? Would you be more likely to use Golantz’s computer app or Mickey’s sticky notes and color coding? I feel like Mickey’s old school method offers more flexibility but it certainly seems more labor intensive. I’m going to trust Mick!
Closing argument:
Trevor Elliott is quickly approaching my last nerve with his demands on Mickey. Yes, Mickey works for the client, but his expertise is being compromised by Elliott’s interference. In other news, Ted Vogul of the motorcycle club makes me very nervous.
All 10 episodes of The Lincoln Lawyer are available on Netflix.
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