No Way Out

probably be something like an internet cafe. But at least it was a start.

The next thing she had to do was give David direct access to her internet account. This entailed a loss of privacy. But he hade it clear that this was something she would have to do if she wanted the person caught.

There was a knock on the door, shaking Andi out of her concentration. Andi looked up.

“Who is it?”

“Your lover.”

Andi tossed the laptop aside, raced to the door and opened it.

“You were supposed to be going back to LA,” said Andi as Gene stepped forward.

“You sound disappointed,” Gene replied, encircling Andi’s waist with her arms.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” Andi replied, sliding her hands up Gene’s arms and interlocking her fingers behind her lover’s neck.

“I couldn’t stay away from you babe.”

Gene was about to kiss her when Andi turned away.

“But don’t they need you back at the rape crisis center.”

Gene looked long and hard into Andi’s eyes and tightened her grip around her, emphasizing that she was a prisoner in her arms.

“They need me all right. But right now I need you more… and I think you need me to.”

There was a questioning tone in Gene’s words, and Andi felt a slight, barely perceptible, slackening of Gene’s grip — as if Gene too needed reassurance.

“Of course I need you.”

There was a few seconds of hesitation and then their arms encircled one another and their lips met in a tender but hesitant kiss.

Tuesday, 25 August 2009 — 10:30

David Sedaka was at his desk in his office at the Old Le Conte Hall when he got a phone call from his father.

“Hi dad.”

“Busy?”

“I’m always busy,” said David, looking around his cluttered office in the Le Conte Hall.

“We’ve got the source code.”

“Great! Send it over!”

“Can you look at it right away?”

“Like I promised.”

Barely a minute later, David had downloaded the source code and was opening it in a word processing program on his Linux-based system. Then it was a simple of matter of selecting the “Compare with” option and selecting the file in which he had stored the decompiled version of the program. The difference were highlighted in red, with a line through the deletions and an underline beneath the insertions.

As soon as he scrolled down, he could see that he was right. The original source code version correctly removed the duplicates from the combined temporary database before selecting the panel. For that reason it had a large area for the temporary database, but a small area for the array that held the names and details of the venire panel. But on the decompiled version this was reversed. The array had been deliberately enlarged to allow for the theoretical possibility that all the names would be duplicated. And the removal of duplicates took place after the panel selection was made, with the address pointer for the program redirected to the jury panel array instead of the temporary database.

And that could only mean one thing: this program had been deliberately tampered with! Some one had evidently modified the source code and then recompiled the program and distributed the modified version.

But how could they do that? How could they get the Court Service in many counties to accept the modified version of the program? Could it have been an inside job? Some one within the company?

That would explain how they obtained access to the software — and also might explain how they had managed to get the Court Services to accept it.

But was it likely that some one inside the company would have the motive to do that and the means to avoid detection? Or had it been some very clever and devious outsider?

David had no way of knowing. All he knew was that he had discovered enough to be able to testify under affirmation that this software had been deliberately sabotaged.

He reached for the phone to call his father.

Wednesday, 26 July 2009 — 11:40

“However, I am not convinced by the arguments of counsel for the defense that the facts when taken as a whole amount to a violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights.”

They were in the judge’s chambers on Wednesday morning. Justice Ellen Wagner had heard the defense’s factual submissions about the software, which the prosecution did not challenge and had then retired for an hour to consider her judgment. Neither side wanted to present any more legal arguments, because they both felt they had covered that ground already.

When the lawyers trooped back into her chambers at the end of that hour, Justice Wagner looked solemn. But neither side had any inkling of which way her judgment would go. Now she was delivering her judgment, a devastating blow to the defense with the court stenographer present to record the decision.

“I accept, in the light of the defense’s uncontested claims of fact, that the jury-selection software has indeed been tampered with and that it is a strong possibility that this tampering was done with the express intention of reducing the likelihood of African-Americans and possibly other ethnic minorities from being selected for jury service.

“However, a strong possibility falls short of a probability, let alone a certainty. It is quite possible that the person or person’s who tampered with the software did so for reasons entirely unrelated to racial discrimination. They may, for example, have thought that they were improving the software in some way. In this regard I would note that the defense has failed to offer any evidence of fact that the modification of the software was done by someone outside of the company that developed the software in the first place. It is still within the bounds of possibility that the modification was done by some one within LegalSoft and that there is another more recent version of the source code within the company archives, that has been inadvertently overlooked.

“Furthermore, even if the modification was done by some one outside the company, and even if it was done for the explicit purpose of causing racial discrimination in the composition of jury panels, that would only be the motive of the malicious party who modified the software. That does not mean, however, that such was the intention of the Court Service or the government in using the maliciously modified software. Inasmuch as the test to be applied is intention-based and inasmuch as the Court Service appears to have used the software in good faith, I cannot see that this constitutes a sixth or fourteenth Amendment violation.

“I should also point out that in the case in Kent County, Michigan, cited by the defense — where there was an entirely different but also accidental glitch in the software that had a deleterious effect on the ethnic diversity of juries — they did not at the time select their juries from anything other than the voting register. Indeed they did not start using driver’s registration and state income tax records for jury selection in parallel with voter registration until the year 2007. Thus, it can be