Corporate & Securities Law

DRAM Price Fixing Jury Reaction

By David Fischer

The Recorder, via law.com, has a fascinating article about juror comments following the hung jury in the recent DRAM antitrust trial. 

After 11 trial days, the first thing jurors talked about when they could finally discuss the price-fixing case before them was the government’s star witness, foreperson Phyllis McCaughey said Thursday.

And she was blunt about their assessment of Micron executive Michael Sadler, who testified in the high-stakes DRAM antitrust prosecution against his counterpart at Hynix, defendant Gary Swanson: “Mr. Sadler, we all felt, was a lying sack of shit.”

…

Speaking in the courtroom after Judge Phyllis Hamilton released them, jurors indicated they were evenly split when they first began deliberations. But they quickly tilted 11-1 for acquittal and stayed that way for several days. Just before they entered the courtroom for the final time, McCaughey said one of her colleagues in favor of acquittal wavered, so the final count was 10-2.

The foreperson said she believed Sadler was a “ringleader” in the price-fixing conspiracy and didn’t deserve a pass from the government. Since Micron was the first computer memory company to report the price-fixing scheme, all of its executives — and the company — received amnesty.

Even Joe Supple, the teacher who was the government’s lone defender in the jury room, acknowledged misgivings about Sadler.

“He didn’t sit well with many of us,” Supple said. “It seemed to be like the bad guy getting away with it.” Swanson was the only executive caught up in the government’s DRAM investigation to go to trial, and the case was closely followed by dozens of lawyers.

I’d post the entire article, it is that good, but Antitrust Review would prefer to avoid copyright violations.  Instead, here is the link again.

Full post as published by Antitrust Review on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).