The false identity of juror number seven

The false identity of juror number seven is the discovery that the person occupying that seat in Walter Elliot’s trial was not the juror named in the court’s records. Mickey Haller’s investigator, Cisco Wojciechowski, traced irregularities in the juror’s paperwork to a man identified as David McSweeney; the court later established that the name attached to the seat belonged to Rodney L. Banglund, who had never received a summons. The revelation turned a suspicious juror into evidence of a deliberate intrusion into the selection process and brought the possibility of a planted sleeper into sharper focus.

The discrepancy in the juror’s record

The first warning came from the J-sheet, the form completed during voir dire. It listed juror number seven as a resident of Palos Verdes, an engineer employed by Lockheed, and someone who had never been arrested. Cisco Wojciechowski found the information increasingly difficult to reconcile with the person he was investigating. He followed the juror from the courthouse to an apartment off Beverly, behind CBS, rather than to the listed area. A friend checked the license plate on the pickup truck the man drove home; the registration linked it to David McSweeney at that same apartment address. Cisco also obtained a driver’s-license photograph and recognized the man as the person he had followed.

The address was only one of several contradictions. Cisco found that the supposed juror had two arrests on his record: one for assault with a deadly weapon in 1997 and another for conspiracy to commit fraud in 1999. Neither had resulted in a conviction, but both conflicted with his answer on the J-sheet that he had never been arrested. Cisco also called Lockheed and found no David McSweeney in its phone directory, despite the form’s claim that the juror was an engineer there. The mismatches suggested more than an inaccurate answer: Cisco suspected that the name itself might be false.

That distinction mattered because the J-sheet’s name had been blacked out on the copy Haller gave Cisco. Cisco could identify the person physically occupying seat seven as David McSweeney, but could not verify that this was the name in the court’s unredacted record. He proposed that McSweeney might have taken over a legitimate juror’s name and perhaps that person’s summons as well. His theory was not yet proof of the impostor’s identity or method; it explained why a person apparently using one name could sit in court under another.

How the deception could work

Cisco described a possible point of entry at juror check-in. In his account, clerks checked a driver’s license against the jury list, a procedure he believed could be exploited with false identification. If an impostor obtained a summons belonging to someone else and presented a matching false license, he might pass the initial check. This was Cisco’s explanation of how the substitution could have occurred, not an established account of every step. The central fact remained that the court’s records and the man in seat seven did not correspond.

The deception was especially consequential because of what Walter Elliot had told Haller about the alleged jury-fixing plan. Elliot said Jerry Vincent had been approached with an offer to place a sleeper on the panel, on the condition that the trial date not be changed. The defense would avoid striking the planted juror, while a juror who appeared to favor the prosecution would be less likely to draw a challenge from the other side. The discovery of an impostor in seat seven gave that account a concrete and alarming point of contact with the trial, although the identity evidence alone did not establish who arranged the substitution or prove every detail of the alleged scheme.

The court confirms the substitution

The issue reached the courtroom after the judge had considered how to address it and consulted other judges. The judge had been prepared to raise the matter with counsel, but juror number seven did not appear that day. Court deputies went to the address associated with the juror. His wife said he was at work and knew nothing about a trial or court appearance. Deputies then went to Lockheed, found the man they were looking for, and brought him to court. He was not the person who had been sitting in seat seven.

The court’s records named the missing juror as Rodney L. Banglund, an engineer from Lockheed who lived in Palos Verdes. Banglund, the real person on the list, said he had never received a jury summons. He also appeared unaware of the court proceedings. The man who had sat in his place for two weeks was therefore not Banglund; the court did not know who that man really was, and by the time the substitution was established he was missing. The judge described the summons as apparently hijacked, while leaving the reason for the impersonation unanswered and referring that question to the sheriff’s department.

Significance in the Elliot trial

The exposure undermined the assumption that the jury had been assembled from the people identified in the court’s records. It also showed why Cisco had treated the J-sheet’s ordinary details—address, employer, arrest history, and name—as leads rather than reliable facts. Taken separately, an incorrect address or a missing name in a company directory might have seemed inconclusive. Together with the false arrest-history answer, the plate check, and the court’s discovery that Banglund had never been summoned, they pointed to a substitution substantial enough to disrupt the proceedings.

For Haller, the false identity connected the practical mechanics of jury selection to the ethical and legal danger of Elliot’s account. Elliot had described a sleeper intended to remain on the panel through deliberations, and the impostor’s presence made the possibility of manipulation harder to dismiss. Yet important questions remained unresolved: the authorities did not know the missing man’s true identity, the reason for the impersonation had not been established, and the evidence described here did not identify who arranged it. The episode’s force lies in that combination of confirmation and uncertainty: the court learned that its seventh juror was not its seventh juror, but the person who had occupied the seat had vanished before the breach could be fully explained.