Judge Makes Mis-Trial Ruling In Quattrone Case

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

27 October 2003

A mistrial was declared on Friday in the case against former CFSB star banker, Frank Quattrone, being held in New York after the jury said for the third time that they were hopelessly deadlocked. The Manhattan Attorney's office said later that they hadn't yet decided whether to retry Mr. Quattrone.

In a note sent to Judge Owen on the fifth day of deliberations, jurors revealed that "consensus is that we will not be able to reach a unanimous vote on any of the three counts". Despite this, however, the judge sent them away, asking them to re-examine their position overnight. But on Friday morning the jury one more time told the judge that they could not agree.

According to one of the jurors interviewed after the mistrial ruling, six out of eleven jurors had been in favor of acquittal on all three charges until Friday morning, when three jurors apparently changed their mind and decided to vote for a conviction on two of the counts, leaving just two in favour of acquittal - these two said that they were concerned by the paucity of evidence against the accused.

Mr Quattrone stood accused of forwarding and endorsing an e-mail in December 2000, suggesting that CSFB employees 'clean up' their files in the face of an SEC investigation into the stock allocation process during 'hot' initial punlic offerings (IPOs) in the late 1990s.

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