In a 20th floor conference room of One Ashburton Place about an hour later, Coakley said it’s unclear what the next steps will be, but defended the decision to bring charges against Cahill.
By ANDY METZGER
BOSTON - While former Massachusetts Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill left the courthouse elated on Wednesday – neither convicted nor fully vindicated by a hung jury that created a mistrial – Attorney General Martha M. Coakley said her office could try the former prosecutor again on charges of a conspiracy to misuse state funds.
“It’s elation. Total elation,” Cahill, 54, told reporters on the plaza outside of Suffolk Superior Court where he spent nearly two months fighting charges that he conspired to run Massachusetts State Lottery ads to aid his 2010 campaign for governor. He said, “I’m relieved and I’m thrilled.”
In a 20th floor conference room of One Ashburton Place about an hour later, Coakley said it’s unclear what the next steps will be, but defended the decision to bring charges against Cahill.
“We found significant evidence that he attempted to use $1.5 million in taxpayer money as if it was his own campaign account, and to the detriment of the state lottery. Faced with this evidence, we certainly could not ignore it,” Coakley said. She said, “I believe that the only way we will change things in this Commonwealth is to be willing to bring cases of public corruption when we believe we have the evidence.”
Both Cahill and Coakley praised the jury for their hard work, which involved seven days and more than 40 hours of deliberations, according to Judge Christine Roach. Those closed-door deliberations were civil, even amid disagreements between those who believed Cahill was guilty of the two conspiracy counts, and those who thought the prosecution hadn’t completely proved its case, according to two jurors both of whom declined to divulge their names.
“The room was strongly in favor of guilt,” a female juror told the News Service. The woman declined to say whether she sided with a guilty verdict or an acquittal, and praised the process. She said, “Mostly it was 12 people trying to get something done.”
A man who conceded to being identified by his juror number, 15, said he was not persuaded to budge from his vote to acquit and declined to comment on how many people were on his side and how many favored a guilty verdict.
“The fact that you can’t conspire with yourself is a critical factor, and there were two people who were named as co-conspirators but weren’t in the room. Never heard from them,” the man told reporters, referring to Mike Sheehan, the CEO of ad agency Hill Holliday, and Alfred Grazioso Jr., the Lottery’s former chief of staff who faces charges of obstruction of justice related to the case. The jury had also sent legal questions to the judge about how to consider the other alleged conspirator’s roles.
Juror 15 said the jury was “a smart group,” comprising people in the fields of nursing, writing and construction work. He said that he is self-employed as a graphic designer.
The case will be back in court on Jan. 4 for a status review, and Coakley said that in the meantime prosecutors will be weighing whether to try proving the case in front of another jury.
“We have now what is a hung jury, which means Tim Cahill is in the same position he was when the indictments were returned,” Coakley said.
Asked whether he would have preferred an acquittal to the mistrial, Cahill told reporters, “It’s always nice to get all 12, but I don’t think I’ve ever won a unanimous vote in my life.”
The charges against Cahill stem from a decision to run brand-boosting Lottery ads at a cost of $1.5 million while Cahill’s gubernatorial campaign was running ads touting his success at the Lottery. That alleged unwarranted privilege became a criminal act with a sentence of up to five years in prison through a 2009 ethics reform law. Cahill’s co-defendant, longtime aide Scott Campbell, was acquitted of his charges in the case on Tuesday, by the same jury.
Asked if the prosecution was a waste of money, Cahill told reporters, “After having my motives questioned for the last two years over what I did in public service, it’s not my right or my call to question anyone else’s motives. It’s for you folks and others to say.”
Cahill’s defense attorneys, Brad Bailey and Jeff Denner, told reporters outside the courtroom that the case against Cahill belonged at the Ethics Commission, not in front of a jury with felony charges hanging in the balance.
Asked about Cahill’s decision to testify in his own defense, Denner said, “An awful lot of so-called politicians that are accused of wrongdoing don’t get up. They talk a lot in the press, and they talk a lot in the beginning, but don’t get up and under oath give their story and risk being examined and cross examined, and Tim Cahill did that.”
Noting that “charges are still pending,” Coakley declined to say whether that decision had been a boon for the prosecution, as it allowed prosecutor James O’Brien to confront Cahill in front of the jury. O’Brien, the lead prosecutor in the case and the chief of the AG’s Public Integrity Division, did not appear alongside Coakley during her post-mistrial press conference as he had when the indictment was announced in April.
Coakley said, unless prosecutors can bring cases against public officials suspected of wrongdoing, “The culture – if there is one – of corruption won’t change, because as people will say, ‘Well everybody does it.’ So even though nobody likes it, nobody changes it.”
For Cahill, the jurors’ inability to reach a conclusion in the case ends what had become a daily routine for the former treasurer and onetime Quincy city councilor and restaurateur: sitting passively in court while his fate was determined by lawyers, Judge Christine Roach, and ultimately 12 people whom he had never met.
It was also a victory, according to Cahill.
“The government had a job to do and they spent two years doing it and spared no expense – and that was to find me guilty, which they did not do. I feel it was total vindication,” Cahill said.
Under court order to avoid news stories on the case, the jurors were just as ignorant of the political speculation surrounding the case as the pundits were of the jury. Juror 15 said the jurors were also unfamiliar with Cahill’s 2010 campaign.
“We all shared a regret about not knowing more about this case and therefore being selected,” the man said. He also said, “I am dying to read the paper and find out what y’all been writing.”
Much of the speculation about the Cahill case has been about whether a failure to convict Cahill would damage Coakley’s reputation. Asked if she thought the hung jury would hurt her politically, Coakley said, “I don’t believe so. I don’t make those decisions based on that.”
Asked about how she navigates the gray areas of life as a public official and sometimes candidate, Coakley said she makes every attempt to follow the law, and pointed out that officials can consult the Office of Campaign and Political Finance and the Ethics Commission with questions.
“It’s incumbent upon everybody, including me, to understand what the law requires – the letter of the law as well as what the spirit of the law is – I try and do that. I try and follow the law in doing that, and I know that I will be held accountable if I don’t,” Coakley said.
The case against Cahill – that he allegedly put $1.5 million of Lottery money into the service of his campaign – is clearly a violation of law, Coakley said.
“If you believe the charges, this was not a gray area,” Coakley said.
State House News Service writer Mike Deehan contributed to this report.