Timothy Nessner said he didn’t personally know Michael Madigan, but he sure heard about him growing up.
Nessner was born and raised on the South Side and has lived in his Beverly home since 2013. He said he went to the same high school as Madigan and always heard good things about him.
But over the last few weeks, Nessner found himself the foreman of the jury that handed down a landmark verdict against Madigan that could send the 82-year-old politician to prison on corruption charges.
“I went to the same high school as he did and I’ve always heard of him to be a good person,” Nessner told the Sun-Times. “But I also know that good people sometimes break the law. In this particular case, the evidence proved to me that that’s what happened.”
The jury found Madigan guilty Wednesday of a nearly decade-long bribery conspiracy involving ComEd. They also convicted him of a plot to install ex-Ald. Danny Solis on a state board in exchange for Solis’ help securing private business for Madigan’s law firm.
But the jury stopped far short of delivering everything that prosecutors sought. Most importantly, jurors couldn’t agree whether Madigan was guilty of a broad racketeering conspiracy by turning his political empire into a criminal enterprise.
Nessner and other jurors interviewed by the Sun-Times said the jury managed to keep its cool as they reviewed months of testimony and evidence, including video secretly recorded by the FBI.
“We re-listened to the tapes over and over, ad nauseam,” one juror, a 44-year-old suburban educator, said.
The length of the trial was also an issue. Taking in information over four months “was hard to process,” she said, wishing prosecutors had been “less verbose.”
“The prosecution almost gave us too much information,” the juror said. “It was cognitive overload.”
During deliberations, jurors each made their own case to each other, presenting evidence for or against each count, the juror said. But they could not come to a consensus on some of the counts.
“We were just talking in circles,” the juror said.
She said two jurors disagreed on several of the counts. “Some people stood very firm. They said, even if you present more evidence, we’d still not agree.”
But, she added, deliberations never got heated. “Some people were genuinely listening to understand, rather than listening to hear,” she said.
Prosecutors’ most convincing arguments dealt with bribery conspiracy charges involving ComEd, the juror said.
One particular tape stood out, a recorded call between ComEd executive John Hooker and Madigan confidant McClain on whether an issue had been brought to Madigan’s attention.
“It made us think he does know something. … That piece of conversation was eye-opening,” she said.
The juror said she was also not convinced by Madigan’s own testimony, though she said some jurors responded positively to what it said about his character.
“When [the prosecutor] said, ‘You haven’t been entirely truthful’ … that was more eye-opening,” she said.
The juror said she did not understand the importance of the case until Wednesday when the judge freed the jurors to read about the case and speak with reporters for the first time.
“I didn’t realize how big it was until we came out of our bubble today,” she said. “You know it’s big, but you’re not allowed to read about it.”
Another juror, the youngest member of the panel at 23, described herself as a first-generation American with little familiarity with the U.S. court system.
She, too, talked about the “very long and tedious process” of reviewing months of evidence and testimony.
“Re-reviewing all of the evidence, re-reviewing all the instructions, really combing through those elements and what’s in those instructions, with a fine-tooth comb, and making sure that we understood it to the best of our abilities,” she said. “But there were some people who just had understood them in different ways.”
She said the group spent days discussing the handful of counts that they would ultimately leave blank because of objections from at least two jurors
“We were trying to get them to understand our point of view and why we felt that their point of view might be lacking some substance,” she said. “I think it just came down to how they interpreted the law, how they interpreted some of those definitions within the law, and how they interpreted some of the evidence.”
She said she was “shocked” when Madigan was called to the stand, but in her eyes, it “really humanized him” in both a “good and bad way.”
“It really put a focus on, this is a person, this isn’t just someone that we’re reading about or just listening to,” she said. “ Frankly, I think he did do a lot of great things for Illinois, and we heard that from all the other testimony, and we could see that the legislation that he was involved in generally did help Illinois and the residents of Illinois.
“But we did hear some conflicting testimony from him,” she added.
The parts of Madigan’s testimony that concerned her the most were his comments about his relationship with longtime aide and friend Michael McClain.
“He was saying that he wasn’t very close, or as close to McClain as what the plaintiff or government was trying to portray, where it was very clear to me, at least, that they were very, very close.”
Nessner said jurors had reached a decision on the charges related to the Chinatown scheme, but a juror chose to take another look at the evidence and threw a wrench into the group’s decision.
“There was a heavy sigh of frustration because we had all those counts settled already, or we thought we did, but we are all very respectful,” Nessner said.
It was then that the jury sent a note to the judge Tuesday evening saying they had had enough for the day.
The group looked at everything with “fresh eyes” Wednesday morning but realized the juror was not going to budge, Nessner said.
Nessner said the evidence presented at trial led him to believe that Solis was “not a very good person” and the conversations between Solis and Madigan cemented that feeling for him and ultimately led him to vote guilty on those counts.
“There was evidence throughout the trial that Danny Solis was a dirty operator, that he was willing to serve himself,” Nessner said.
Madigan “should have had enough to go on to know that [Solis] was a dirty operator,” he said. “When the state board seat came up, and the recommendation to the board came up, I felt like his willingness to provide that board seat, in spite of his knowing that [Solis] was a dirty operator, was not fair to the people of Illinois. And with the rules that we were provided there was no other way I could vote other than guilty on that.”
Nessner said he was proud of the work the jury did, and that it shows there are checks and balances against politicians.
But he also said the moment is not a celebration, and he wasn’t happy that he had to find someone guilty of a crime.
“I don’t think there is an overwhelming amount of people who would say that they want to convict anyone of anything,” Nessner said. “So the feeling that’s involved with pronouncing someone guilty of anything where there may be a prison sentence involved didn’t make me feel good.”