Michael Madigan trial: Jurors describe reaching verdict

For more than four long months, jurors in the Michael Madigan corruption trial were strictly forbidden from researching any outside information about the landmark case they held in their hands.

But after they rendered their verdict Wednesday and the ban was lifted, a few jurors went to lunch together and started to Google. They were at Elephant & Castle near the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, where the impact of their decision was still unfolding in the glare of the Chicago media.

Only then, according to one juror, did they realize how momentous the trial really was — the breadth and depth of the investigation that felled the former House speaker, and the number of other players convicted or charged along the way.

“(I had) just this sense of wonder,” said Juror 2, a 44-year-old woman from the west suburbs who declined to be identified publicly. “Wow, we were part of something really big.”

The marathon trial ended with marathon deliberations. Jurors’ discussions stretched out over 11 days, and ended in a complicated split verdict. Madigan was convicted on 10 counts, including bribery conspiracy related to the now-notorious ComEd scheme. He was acquitted of numerous others. And on six counts, including the marquee racketeering conspiracy charge, jurors deadlocked. Jurors also deadlocked on all six counts related to Madigan co-defendant Michael McClain, a longtime lobbyist.

By Wednesday evening, the jury’s foreman was having an Old Style and a cigarette in front of his Beverly home, snowflakes piling up on his head and in his mustache.

Tim Nessner, 46, said the trial and deliberations had been stressful — some of the witnesses had shown up in his dreams — but he didn’t think he would sleep well now that it was over.

“Anytime you send down 10 guilty verdicts against an individual, nobody should sleep well,” he said.

Nessner told the Tribune that on the main racketeering charge, jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquittal. Personally, he said, 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 something stuck,” Nessner said after the verdict.

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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, Juror 2 said.

“We got to a point where we felt comfortable with everything we had, and then there were some we could just not agree on,” she 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.”

The verdict, while mixed, is sure to reverberate across the political landscape. Madigan, once the most powerful politician in the state, joins a long parade of Illinois and Chicago officials convicted in corruption cases.

Prosecutors have not yet said whether they would retry Madigan or McClain on the deadlocked counts.

McClain already was convicted of bribery-related charges in the Madigan-adjacent “ComEd Four” trial, though jurors in the Madigan case were not made aware of that. 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.

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 the 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.

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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 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 other’s 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.”

Nessner has three children, the youngest of whom is 6. When she takes Illinois history a few years from now and Madigan’s trial and verdict inevitably come up in her class, Nessner said he’d explain his role to her the same way he did to the rest of the jury on the first day of deliberation: “Believe in being a good citizen of Chicago. Believe in being a good citizen of Illinois and the United States. Believe in your government. Believe in the justice system. You have to have faith in where you live.”

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.