Computer sabotage verdict set aside

Network World - A U.S. District Court judge in Newark, N.J., on Friday set aside the guilty verdict in the case of a former network administrator who had been convicted in May on a federal charge of computer sabotage.
A jury found Tim Lloyd, 37, of Wilmington, Del., guilty of planting a software time bomb in a centralized file server at Omega Engineering Corp.'s Bridgeport, N.J., manufacturing plant. The malicious software code destroyed the programs that ran the company's manufacturing machines, costing Omega more than $10 million in losses and eventually leading to 80 layoffs.
Judge William H. Walls, who presided over the four-week trial, set aside the decision after one of the jurors approached the court with concerns after the guilty verdict had been handed in.
The juror told the judge she was unsure whether a piece of information that she had heard on the television news had been factored into her verdict, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney V. Grady O'Malley, who prosecuted the case. "Although she couldn't articulate what impact it had, she simply made the statement that she was unsure about whether it was important to bring to the court's attention," O'Malley said.
O'Malley, who said he was "mystified" by Walls' decision, said he will appeal the decision to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. If the appeal fails, he will retry the case, he said.
"[The juror's statement] had nothing to do with the evidence in the case," said O'Malley. "It had nothing to do with how the government presented its case. ý This had to do with an extraneous piece of information that one juror seemed to focus on after the verdict came in. You can't go behind the deliberation process. If that were the case, no verdict would be safe."
The Lloyd case was the first federal criminal prosecution of computer sabotage. Industry observers hailed the conviction as a precedent-setting victory, proving that the government is capable of tracking down and prosecuting computer crime. The prosecution's case came after a four-year investigation by the U.S. Secret Service and expert testimony by a renowned data recovery professional.
Lloyd, who didn't testify in court, has maintained his innocence. "There's no way in the world I did this," he said in an interview after the verdict was handed down in May.
The case stems from a July 31, 1996, incident at Omega, a Stamford, Conn., manufacturer of customized high-tech measurement and instrumentation devices. On that morning, a worker at Omega South, the manufacturing plant, booted up the central file server that housed more than 1,000 programs