Jury Duty, finally over
I just spent three weeks empaneled on a Federal Jury.
The case was about a stock option grant at MacAffee/Network Associates for which the date/grant price was changed in some way back in 2000. It was never sold, but it belonged to the VP of Legal Affairs at the time, and over the course of the next four years, he reported it on SEC filings and other forms, possibly opening him to mail fraud charges. Eventually, when the company was investigating the stock issues, he came forward and was promptly fired. And even more eventually, the FBI filed charges against him.
Despite the two banker’s boxes of evidence and several days of testimony, we found him not guilty on two halves of the charges of mail fraud and hung on the other halves, as well as on the question of altering company records.
Things I learned:
- Your email is going to sound really stupid when read aloud by a witness in a federal court. Trust me.
- Please remember to date any papers you sign. While it may not result in the verdict you want, it will probably result in a faster one. Your jury will thank you (even if they convict you).
- If you ever have a conversation about changing the date/price of your stock options with someone, and they later get changed, you should immediately find out if that’s legal.
- FBI agents really do come in pairs. Ours looked like Rob Corddrey and Matt Daemon.
- Yes, they _will_ introduce all the relevant documentation in paper format. We had a binder containing 1600 pages of every stock grant given by MacAfee over 10 years. “Just in case.”
- They will also very likely introduce as evidence the greeting card that everybody signed when you got fired. And possibly bring in one of the people who signed it to testify.
- It’s pretty amazing anyone ever gets convicted. Think of the last time you tried to get 12 people to agree on where to have dinner. Now try to get them all to agree that all five elements of a mail fraud indictment were satisfied by evidence presented by the prosecution over a period of two weeks.
- Code names matter. In this case, an investigation into stock backdating was called “Project Shield.” The defense claimed that this was because it was because the board wanted to shield themselves from liability. The prosecution actually brought in a senior director of the company that did the investigation in order to explain that it was because they thought that MacAfee made some kind of “shield” related product.
There’s some press about it:
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202424944505
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/10/01/in-big-backdating-trial-defense-rests-without-putting-on-witnesses/
Today’s conviction of one of his contemporaries (who signed off on the change). This morning the judge called us in and asked us all if we’d read the papers (since she was going to have to remind us not to pay any attention to this story). She confiscated a few copies of the Chronicle.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/02/BUEU13AKT7.DTL
* I didn’t even get to read off the verdict to the court!