Day 11: Afternoon Session

The afternoon session resumed with continuation of Ms. Chamberlain’s testimony for the United States.  Ms. Chamberlain is a financial analyst working for the US Attorney's Office. 

The Government introduced several exhibits compiled by Ms. Chamberlain in order to show summaries of stock sales made by Nacchio between 1998 and 2001. The charts were compiled using several different source documents and were presented in bar graph format.   Several of the graphs compared sales between what Mr. Nacchio would have realized had he used the February Sales & Purchasing Plan in 2001 versus what he actually made.  A comparison of gross proceeds showed that during the Q1 2001 trading window Mr. Nacchio realized an actual profit in excess of $48.1 million versus a possible $6.7 million under the February Trading plan. The Government utilized their direct of Ms. Chamberlain to illustrate consistent patterns of both sizable and highly profitable stock sales by Mr. Nacchio in the first half of 2001. 

On cross examination, Marci Gilligan, counsel for the Defendant, attempted to show that the trading patterns evidenced from the charts prepared by Ms. Chamberlain (which showed that Mr. Nacchio's trading activity in the first two quarters of 2001 was substantially greater than in the six prior quarters) had innocuous explanations.  Ms. Gilligan brought out that the higher numbers in the first quarter of 2001 was related to the sale of the Growth Shares, a unique occurrence n no way indicative of a specific pattern of trading. Ms. Gilligan also brought out that some of the less active trading periods occurred during the period when Qwest was completing the merger with US West.  

After repeated questions regarding the various graphs and chart based summaries, Ms. Gilligan began a series of questions about the Government's level of supervision of Ms. Chamberlain's work in preparation for the trial. When Ms. Chamberlain responded in the negative to a question about whether the Government patterned the data Ms. Chamberlain produced, Ms. Gilligan concluded her questioning  by rhetorically asking whether [the Government] picked out  [the information] they liked.

The Prosecution did take an opportunity for re-direct and asked a series of questions aimed at better clarifying the purpose behind Ms. Chamberlain's work in support of the Government's case. Ms. Chamberlain testified that the series of graphs were designed to show comparisons within a certain time period for several different aspects of Mr. Nacchio's trading activity. Ms. Chamberlain also testified that she had no knowledge of whether Mr. Nacchio was limited in his ability to engage in trading activity under Qwest's Employee Stock Purchasing Plan; and that she did not know of any prohibitions Mr. Nacchio might have in either exercising or holding any of the 2.5 million shares he sold in 2001.  After Ms. Chamberlain stepped down the United States rested its case.

 After a brief explanation by Judge Nottingham to the jury regarding the court's plans for the rest of the afternoon session, the jury was sent home so that both Prosecution and Defense could present arguments concerning Defense's motions to acquit or issue a mistrial. After a couple of hours of determined motions hearings, Judge Nottingham adjourned the court with the promise that he would return tomorrow with his decisions regarding the acquittal and the mistrial motions.