The fraud and conspiracy trial of four former Qwest executives ended Friday with the acquittal of two defendants and no convictions, a devastating end for the federal government’s two-year criminal investigation.
John M. Walker, Bryan K. Treadway, Grant P. Graham and Thomas W. Hall each faced 11 counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud and false statements.
Interviews with three jurors Saturday revealed that:
Interviews with the three jury members revealed that they felt the prosecution’s case was overloaded with irrelevant details.
“They tried to cover too much evidence that wasn’t necessary to the case,” said jury foreman George Gerstle, 46, a manager for the Colorado Department of Transportation. “They threw everything and the kitchen sink (at the defendants) hoping that something would stick. Some of the jurors resented that.”
The jury of eight women and four men heard seven weeks of evidence and testimony at the federal courthouse in downtown Denver.
They began deliberations April 5, hunkered down in a small seventh-floor jury room. In their hands were the fates of four former Qwest executives charged with concocting a plan to fraudulently book $33.6 million in revenue from a 2001 equipment sale to Arizona schools.
The four defendants faced up to 10 years in prison on each of three counts and up to five years on each of the eight other counts.
Jurors acquitted Treadway, a former assistant controller at Qwest, within three days of beginning deliberations.
“With Bryan Treadway, there was just no evidence,” said juror Barbara Carmichael, 55, a retired elementary school teacher in Louisville.
Gerstle said it was “pretty clear” that Treadway hadn’t been told about everything.
Treadway’s attorney, Stephen Cowen, had maintained throughout the trial, and after Friday’s verdict, that the charges against his client were baseless.
“Mr. Treadway and his family are very gratified with the jury’s verdict,” Cowen said Friday. “He’s going to get his life back in order.”
Walker, a former vice president of sales at Qwest, was similarly acquitted by the jury within the first three days, according to the jurors interviewed.
“The fact that Walker was on vacation (during key moments when the alleged fraud occurred) was (a) reason he was acquitted,” Carmichael said.
Carmichael said she felt all along that the government did not prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the guilt of any of the defendants.
After five days of deliberations, on April 9, the jurors issued a note to U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn, stating they had reached consensus on 24 of 44 total charges. Though it wasn’t made public at the time, their finding on 22 of those 24 charges had found Treadway and Walker not guilty on all counts.
When the jury turned its attention to defendants Hall and Graham, there were signs that it was heading toward a deadlock.
The jurors attempted to re-create a timeline of Hall’s and Graham’s actions on a whiteboard in the jury room.
“We tried basically to determine who knew what and when,” said juror Dana Patton, 56, an aerial survey photographer from Arvada. “We charted a timeline, mapping the overlapping of their correspondence.”
Graham was a Qwest senior vice president of finance, in the same business unit as Hall, a senior vice president of sales.
But the timeline never convinced all jurors beyond a reasonable doubt about Hall’s and Graham’s motives, Patton said.
Ten jurors believed Graham was guilty on two counts of securities fraud, said Gerstle, who voted for conviction.
Graham “was pushing hard to get these deals closed by the deadlines,” Gerstle said. “He signed some documents stating that everything was done according to accounting principles. It was his responsibility to put a stop to it.”
But two jurors, including Carmichael, were never swayed.
In the end, Graham was acquitted of three charges of wire fraud. There was no jury verdict on the remaining eight charges.
As to Hall, jurors came achingly close to clearing him on seven charges of wire fraud and false statements.
On the whiteboard, the jurors had written a unanimous 12-0 vote to find Hall not guilty on those seven charges.
Three jurors interviewed said that a wavering male juror got up and changed the number on the whiteboard from 12 in favor of acquittal to 11.
“As we were filling out our jury forms at the very end – in the last 15 minutes (on Friday) – one of the jurors decided that he wanted to change back to a guilty vote,” Carmichael said. “So we had to switch it to undecided.”
The last-minute switch on Hall’s verdict left him as the only defendant who wasn’t acquitted of any charges. Both he and Graham face the possibility that the government will retry them on the deadlocked charges.
Prosecutors said Friday that they were disappointed by the jury’s verdicts and would decide within two weeks whether to retry Graham and Hall.
“Each case stands on its own,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney William Leone, the lead prosecutor. “It would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on one case.”
Denver Post staff writers Kris Hudson and Tom McGhee contributed to this report.
