The foreman of the jury that rendered a split decision in the landmark trial of former House Speaker Michael Madigan said Wednesday that the panel was deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquittal on the main racketeering charge and that he felt much of the prosecution was “government overreach.”
“This was a guy they wanted to go after, and they gathered as much as they could against him and and something stuck,” Tim Nessner, 46, an insurance underwriter from Chicago’s Far Southwest Side, told the Tribune in a phone interview hours after the verdict.
Another juror, a 23-year-old woman who declined to be identified by name, also said that for the deadlocked counts, most of the jurors were leaning one way with a couple of holdouts on the other side.
Jurors who spoke to the Tribune on Wednesday said the deliberations were extremely collaborative and detail-oriented.
Jurors even made posters with timelines that they hung up on the walls of the jury room, said Juror 2, a 44-year-old woman from the west suburbs who asked not to be identified by name.
“We got to a point where we felt comfortable with everything we had, and then there were some we could just not agree on,” Juror 2 told the Tribune. “At some point you have to say, ‘I give you my point of view, and someone else can give you their point of view and provide their evidence, but nobody is budging. They’re standing their ground, because that’s the right everyone has.”
Nessner said the panel was “purposeful” in their evaluation of the evidence, going through each of the charges in the 23-count indictment one by one, sifting through the evidence and applying the judge’s instructions before reaching their decision.
At times, the discussions grew difficult, and “volumes may have been raised” but “there was never any yelling,” Nessner said.
“Some of us were more frustrated than others,” he said. “We had very healthy debates, we had very immersive debates where we were going through a mountain of evidence. But we tried to keep on track and use the indictment as a guide as to where each count led us.”
In a verdict sure to reverberate across the political landscape, the jury found Madigan, once the most powerful politician in the state, guilty of bribery conspiracy and other corruption charges alleging he used his public office to increase his power, line his own pockets and enrich a small circle of his most loyal associates.
But the jurors’ final decision, which came on the 11th day of deliberations, was overall mixed, with the panel deadlocking on several counts — including the marquee racketeering conspiracy charge — and acquitting Madigan on numerous others.
Jurors also deadlocked on all six counts related to Madigan’s co-defendant, Michael McClain. Malik, a juror who spoke to reporters shortly after the verdict was read and asked to be identified only by his first name, said that several on the panel viewed McClain’s actions as legal lobbying. Malik said he did not know that McClain had already been convicted on bribery-related charges in the related “ComEd Four” case.
Nessner said that soon after he volunteered to be foreman, an informal straw poll was taken that showed the panel of eight women and four men was all over the map. Once they got to work, Nessner said he continuously stressed to his colleagues that they should start with the presumption that both defendants were innocent, as they were instructed to do.
Eventually, he said, the panel reached a point where they were 11-1 to acquit both Madigan and McClain on the racketeering charge, as well as four counts involving the transfer of a state-owned parcel of land in Chinatown, but there was one holdout who “was not going to change their vote” of guilty.
It was a similar story with the single charge involving an alleged bribery scheme by AT&T Illinois, where Nessner said they deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal for Madigan and McClain.
In a surprise move, Madigan took the stand in his own defense last month — a decision that was rare for a public corruption trial and left the former speaker exposed to a brutal cross-examination. His testimony was the subject of much discussion, jurors said.
The 23-year-old juror said Madigan appeared to be a “very composed and intelligent individual” during his testimony, and that she respected the length of his career. However, she said some of his testimony felt “odd and contradictory” to the evidence.
One thing that stood out to that juror was that many witnesses testified that Madigan and McClain were good friends, both personally and professionally — so when Madigan made remarks indicating otherwise, she found it a “little odd.”
Juror 2 told the Tribune she was struck by the “roundabout way” Madigan answered some questions.
“(The prosecutor) would pose a question and we might get a historical backstory before actually trying to get to the answer, and maybe not even actually hitting the answer to the question,” she said.
Evidence showed that ComEd scrambled to give a job to Kathy Laski, purportedly to appease Madigan and McClain. When Madigan got on the stand, he said he knew Laski from a long-ago block party — and only on cross-examination did he admit that Laski was also the wife of a former alderman. That stuck out in Juror 2’s mind, she said.
“For me personally, that was a pivotal moment that maybe (he was) not telling the whole truth,” she said. “And I know that had an effect.”
The jury was overall mixed on whether Madigan helped or hurt himself on the witness stand, Nessner said, and he thought it was pretty clear to everyone that he was playing fast and loose with the truth when it came to minimizing his relationship with McClain.
Nessner said some of the other jurors felt “that alone gave them the ammunition to question some of (Madigan’s) other testimony.”
“I know that one person just thought if there was one case she thought he was lying, that was enough for her to believe he was lying all the time,” Nessner said.
Another key witness in the trial — Daniel Solis, the former alderman and FBI mole — didn’t fare nearly as well, Nessner said. But ironically, it was Solis’ obvious corruption that helped the jury find Madigan guilty of several counts of trying to help the alderman obtain a state board position, purportedly in exchange for bringing Madigan law business.
“I can tell you I said at least once (in deliberations) that I thought Danny Solis is a piece of garbage,” Nessner said. “And I hate to say that about another person, but I can say that I did not like him at all. I didn’t not like the things he did.”
The fact that Madigan still wanted to give Solis a board appointment even though he was clearly “fishing” for a bribe “did not sit well with me,” Nessner said.
“That was a breach of trust with the people of Illinois,” he said. “Even if he wasn’t willing to deal with him in a ‘this for that’ transaction, the fact that he was willing to reward a person after that … I felt like he should have known it was dirty. That with all the innuendoes and verbage (Solis) used, that person does not deserve a board seat.”
Jurors convicted Madigan on all but one of the counts related to the Solis board appointment scheme.
Juror 2 said she was struck by the fact that Solis apparently could have had his pick of any board seat.
“It wasn’t about choosing the candidate that was well fit (for the job),” she said. “You want somebody who is representing you to choose candidates that have the qualities of the job they’re seeking, and clearly when they say ‘which one do you want’ you don’t have the best interest of the people in mind.”
The 23-year-old juror said that even though Solis brought forth “crucial evidence,” such as phone calls and videos he recorded for the FBI, jurors approached him with “a lot of care and caution” due to his criminal behavior.
“There were some jurors who really did not trust him at all, but I thought the hard evidence he gave was truthful,” she said.
Nessner, who was born and raised in Chicago’s 19th Ward and had a working knowledge of politics going into the trial, said some of what he saw in the evidence was eye-opening. It was also clear to him that elected officials, whether it’s federal representatives in Washington, D.C., or state legislators in Springfield, often operate in an incestuous world where lobbyists and colleagues are all scratching each others’ backs.
“They eat together, they drink together,” he said. “To spend that much time in Springfield away from their families, I can only imagine it’s very easy for people to become corrupt when you not only work amongst but you live amongst your peers. …They’re all going to influence one another, and in some cases corrupt one another.”
Nessner said the jury deliberations hit a low point late in the day on Tuesday, when “we had been there for so long” and some of his fellow jurors began to get emotional over the changes in direction and weighing the idea of acquittal. It was decided to send a note at 3 p.m. asking to quit early and come back “fresh” on Wednesday.
“At one point one juror realized we’re not convicting McClain of anything here, what’s going on?” Nessner said. “We were done for the day. We needed to take a rest and look at it from a different perspective, so that’s why we sent the note.”
Nessner said in the end, he believes their verdict “is very telling of two things: that we are keeping politicians in check, but also government overreach in check.”
“This was never about us,” he said. “This was about the people on trial and the people of Illinois.”
The 23-year-old juror said that before the trial she had been naive about state politics, and didn’t pay much attention to it. The lengthy trial, she said, “really popped that bubble.”
“I definitely feel the need to be more involved and more aware of our state government, and I definitely feel this sense of (worry),” she said. “It’s just, how many other politicians could possibly have a similar way of practice, and making sure that those people are held accountable as well.”
Juror 2 said she appreciated learning so much detail about how government works, but the trial did not change her opinion of state politics.
“You vote how you vote and you hope the person you vote for is doing things in your best interest. And I still have that same hope, I really do,” she said.
Juror 2 said that after the verdict was read, she and a few fellow jurors went to lunch and started looking up all the background information that they had been forbidden to research during the trial.
Only then, she said, did they realize how momentous this case was — and how many other people had been convicted or charged as part of the investigation that culminated in Madigan’s trial.
“We kind of all just were talking, like wow, we didn’t understand how big this was and how many more people were involved,” she said. “(I had) just this sense of wonder, wow, we were part of something really big.”
The Tribune’s Caroline Kubzansky contributed.
The foreman of the jury that rendered a split decision in the landmark trial of former House Speaker Michael Madigan said Wednesday that the panel was deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquittal on the main racketeering charge.
The foreman of the jury that rendered a split decision in the landmark trial of former House Speaker Michael Madigan said Wednesday that the panel was deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquittal on the main racketeering charge and that he felt much of the prosecution was “government overreach.”
“This was a guy they wanted to go after, and they gathered as much as they could against him and and something stuck,” Tim Nessner, 46, an insurance underwriter from Chicago’s Far Southwest Side, told the Tribune in a phone interview hours after the verdict.
Another juror, a 23-year-old woman who declined to be identified by name, also said that for the deadlocked counts, most of the jurors were leaning one way with a couple of holdouts on the other side.
Jurors who spoke to the Tribune on Wednesday said the deliberations were extremely collaborative and detail-oriented.
Jurors even made posters with timelines that they hung up on the walls of the jury room, said Juror 2, a 44-year-old woman from the west suburbs who asked not to be identified by name.
“We got to a point where we felt comfortable with everything we had, and then there were some we could just not agree on,” Juror 2 told the Tribune. “At some point you have to say, ‘I give you my point of view, and someone else can give you their point of view and provide their evidence, but nobody is budging. They’re standing their ground, because that’s the right everyone has.”
Nessner said the panel was “purposeful” in their evaluation of the evidence, going through each of the charges in the 23-count indictment one by one, sifting through the evidence and applying the judge’s instructions before reaching their decision.
At times, the discussions grew difficult, and “volumes may have been raised” but “there was never any yelling,” Nessner said.
“Some of us were more frustrated than others,” he said. “We had very healthy debates, we had very immersive debates where we were going through a mountain of evidence. But we tried to keep on track and use the indictment as a guide as to where each count led us.”
In a verdict sure to reverberate across the political landscape, the jury found Madigan, once the most powerful politician in the state, guilty of bribery conspiracy and other corruption charges alleging he used his public office to increase his power, line his own pockets and enrich a small circle of his most loyal associates.
But the jurors’ final decision, which came on the 11th day of deliberations, was overall mixed, with the panel deadlocking on several counts — including the marquee racketeering conspiracy charge — and acquitting Madigan on numerous others.
Jurors also deadlocked on all six counts related to Madigan’s co-defendant, Michael McClain. Malik, a juror who spoke to reporters shortly after the verdict was read and asked to be identified only by his first name, said that several on the panel viewed McClain’s actions as legal lobbying. Malik said he did not know that McClain had already been convicted on bribery-related charges in the related “ComEd Four” case.
Nessner said that soon after he volunteered to be foreman, an informal straw poll was taken that showed the panel of eight women and four men was all over the map. Once they got to work, Nessner said he continuously stressed to his colleagues that they should start with the presumption that both defendants were innocent, as they were instructed to do.
Eventually, he said, the panel reached a point where they were 11-1 to acquit both Madigan and McClain on the racketeering charge, as well as four counts involving the transfer of a state-owned parcel of land in Chinatown, but there was one holdout who “was not going to change their vote” of guilty.
It was a similar story with the single charge involving an alleged bribery scheme by AT&T Illinois, where Nessner said they deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal for Madigan and McClain.
In a surprise move, Madigan took the stand in his own defense last month — a decision that was rare for a public corruption trial and left the former speaker exposed to a brutal cross-examination. His testimony was the subject of much discussion, jurors said.
The 23-year-old juror said Madigan appeared to be a “very composed and intelligent individual” during his testimony, and that she respected the length of his career. However, she said some of his testimony felt “odd and contradictory” to the evidence.
One thing that stood out to that juror was that many witnesses testified that Madigan and McClain were good friends, both personally and professionally — so when Madigan made remarks indicating otherwise, she found it a “little odd.”
Juror 2 told the Tribune she was struck by the “roundabout way” Madigan answered some questions.
“(The prosecutor) would pose a question and we might get a historical backstory before actually trying to get to the answer, and maybe not even actually hitting the answer to the question,” she said.
Evidence showed that ComEd scrambled to give a job to Kathy Laski, purportedly to appease Madigan and McClain. When Madigan got on the stand, he said he knew Laski from a block party — and only on cross-examination did he admit that Laski was also the wife of a former alderman. That stuck out in Juror 2’s mind, she said.
“For me personally, that was a pivotal moment that maybe (he was) not telling the whole truth,” she said. “And I know that had an effect.”
The jury was overall mixed on whether Madigan helped or hurt himself on the witness stand, Nessner said, and he thought it was pretty clear to everyone that he was playing fast and loose with the truth when it came to minimizing his relationship with McClain.
Nessner said some of the other jurors felt “that alone gave them the ammunition to question some of (Madigan’s) other testimony.”
“I know that one person just thought if there was one case she thought he was lying, that was enough for her to believe he was lying all the time,” Nessner said.
Another key witness in the trial — Daniel Solis, the former alderman and FBI mole — didn’t fare nearly as well, Nessner said. But ironically, it was Solis’ obvious corruption that helped the jury find Madigan guilty of several counts of trying to help the alderman obtain a state board position, purportedly in exchange for bringing Madigan law business.
“I can tell you I said at least once (in deliberations) that I thought Danny Solis is a piece of garbage,” Nessner said. “And I hate to say that about another person, but I can say that I did not like him at all. I didn’t not like the things he did.”
The fact that Madigan still wanted to give Solis a board appointment even though he was clearly “fishing” for a bribe “did not sit well with me,” Nessner said.
“That was a breach of trust with the people of Illinois,” he said. “Even if he wasn’t willing to deal with him in a ‘this for that’ transaction, the fact that he was willing to reward a person after that … I felt like he should have known it was dirty. That with all the innuendoes and verbage (Solis) used, that person does not deserve a board seat.”
Jurors convicted Madigan on all but one of the counts related to the Solis board appointment scheme.
Juror 2 said she was struck by the fact that Solis apparently could have had his pick of any board seat.
“It wasn’t about choosing the candidate that was well fit (for the job),” she said. “You want somebody who is representing you to choose candidates that have the qualities of the job they’re seeking, and clearly when they say ‘which one do you want’ you don’t have the best interest of the people in mind.”
The 23-year-old juror said that even though Solis brought forth “crucial evidence,” such as phone calls and videos he recorded for the FBI, jurors approached him with “a lot of care and caution” due to his criminal behavior.
“There were some jurors who really did not trust him at all, but I thought the hard evidence he gave was truthful,” she said.
Nessner, who was born and raised in Chicago’s 19th Ward and had a working knowledge of politics going into the trial, said some of what he saw in the evidence was eye-opening. It was also clear to him that elected officials, whether it’s federal representatives in Washington, D.C., or state legislators in Springfield, often operate in an incestuous world where lobbyists and colleagues are all scratching each others’ backs.
“They eat together, they drink together,” he said. “To spend that much time in Springfield away from their families, I can only imagine it’s very easy for people to become corrupt when you not only work amongst but you live amongst your peers. …They’re all going to influence one another, and in some cases corrupt one another.”
Nessner said the jury deliberations hit a low point late in the day on Tuesday, when “we had been there for so long” and some of his fellow jurors began to get emotional over the changes in direction and weighing the idea of acquittal. It was decided to send a note at 3 p.m. asking to quit early and come back “fresh” on Wednesday.
“At one point one juror realized we’re not convicting McClain of anything here, what’s going on?” Nessner said. “We were done for the day. We needed to take a rest and look at it from a different perspective, so that’s why we sent the note.”
Nessner said in the end, he believes their verdict “is very telling of two things: that we are keeping politicians in check, but also government overreach in check.”
“This was never about us,” he said. “This was about the people on trial and the people of Illinois.”
The 23-year-old juror said that before the trial she had been naive about state politics, and didn’t pay much attention to it. The lengthy trial, she said, “really popped that bubble.”
“I definitely feel the need to be more involved and more aware of our state government, and I definitely feel this sense of (worry),” she said. “It’s just, how many other politicians could possibly have a similar way of practice, and making sure that those people are held accountable as well.”
Juror 2 said she appreciated learning so much detail about how government works, but the trial did not change her opinion of state politics.
“You vote how you vote and you hope the person you vote for is doing things in your best interest. And I still have that same hope, I really do,” she said.
Juror 2 said that after the verdict was read, she and a few fellow jurors went to lunch and started looking up all the background information that they had been forbidden to research during the trial.
Only then, she said, did they realize how momentous this case was — and how many other people had been convicted or charged as part of the investigation that culminated in Madigan’s trial.
“We kind of all just were talking, like wow, we didn’t understand how big this was and how many more people were involved,” she said. “(I had) just this sense of wonder, wow, we were part of something really big.”
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