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.

The juror should have said it was $100,000.

In a fraud trial

Chef's kiss

There should be a law that states that if this happens and you turn them in then you get to keep the money.

Shouldn't the one person who absolutely should be on the jury be the person reporting a bribery attempt?

All I know is those horrible people are not guilty. Waiting for my bag of money any moment now.

Why do outsiders have access to jurors in the first place? Was the jury not sequestered?

So the bribe was $240,000, you say?

The article is light on details around the actual cash itself but I have to wonder if it wasn't counterfeit. If you are, without any type of conversation, randomly trying to pay off jurors that seems like a lot of real money to just blindly throw at the problem and hope it goes away.

Even $5k or $10k could be a life-changing amount of money for some people, seems like it would be easier/cheaper to start there (if it's real) then promise more on a specific outcome.

It's not like your average person would be able to tell a real from a fake bill...

They're keeping the jury, that's a bad idea. Who knows if anyone accepted.