SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — After a nearly four-month hiatus, the criminal trial of accused hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin resumed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, marking the first time the Northern District has seen an in-person jury since it halted operations and suspended trials due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It's a much different scene than when we broke in March,” U.S. District William Alsup, who is overseeing the case, said from a courtroom outfitted with glass shields and new measures to keep jurors and witnesses six feet apart. He is hosting the trial over Zoom, though the public can also watch the proceedings at the courthouse.
In light of the unprecedented circumstances, both sides agreed carry on with as few as six out of the original 16 jurors.
Alsup began Monday’s proceedings by polling the remaining jurors on their willingness to continue serving. The trial started March 10, but was cut short after just two days of testimony.
He added that over the weekend, one juror had notified the court that her husband’s co-worker had tested positive for Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus. She said she had likely been exposed as well, though could not be tested until Tuesday. Alsup said he had advised the juror to stay home.
"Our first order of business is to see if we can even get six to serve,” he said. “Raise your hand if you're willing to serve and try to complete this case.”
Eleven hands went up, by Alsup’s count. He questioned the four jurors separately about their concerns. One lives with a relative dying of brain cancer and is his primary caregiver. She said he took a turn for the worse since March. Another juror, aged 70, said he has emphysema. A third is a type-1 diabetic. The fourth juror said she has a vacation planned the following week. Alsup excused the first three, but kept the fourth, as the jury is expected to get the case with time for a verdict by Friday.
Nikulin, a Russian national, has been in prison awaiting trial for four years on charges related to cyberattacks on LinkedIn, Dropbox and the now-defunct social networking site Formspring in 2012. Nikulin is accused of breaching company databases and stealing more than 100 million user passwords. He was arrested in the Czech Republic in 2016 and extradited to the U.S. in 2018 to face nine criminal counts of computer intrusion, causing damage to a protected computer, aggravated identity theft, trafficking, and conspiracy.
Alsup has held a series of conferences with attorneys in the intervening months to determine whether the trial could go forward at all. Though he agreed to postpone the trial multiple times due to shelter in place orders imposed by the city and county of San Francisco, Alsup told prosecutors and Nikulin’s defense attorneys repeatedly that he is troubled by how long Nikulin has been in jail.
In June, Alsup ordered the trial to resume on July 6, saying Nikulin had waited long enough. He also wondered whether prosecutors were stalling so that Alsup would declare a mistrial.
“What if our defendant lost four years of his life over a case the government can't prove? I don't like someone to be in pretrial detention this long,” he said.
On Monday, he gave both sides 15 minutes to recap their opening statements for the jury.
Afterward, prosecutors called Ganesh Krishnan, a former LinkedIn employee at the time of the breach. Nikulin is accused of accessing LinkedIn’s internal database by hacking into a computer owned by LinkedIn employee Nick Berry and obtaining access to the company’s virtual private network, which employees use to connect from home to LinkedIn’s corporate system.