Citing misconduct by prosecutors, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ordered a new trial for Reyes, who had been convicted of 10 charges of conspiracy, fraud, making false regulator filings and falsifying records for backdating hundreds of employee stock options.

A favorable turn of luck for Reyes, who had been sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay a $15 million fine for misdeeds that, according to that three-judge panel, had been grossly exaggerated and perhaps even fabricated.

“Deliberate false statements by those privileged to represent the United States harm the trial process and the integrity of our prosecutorial system,” Judge Mary Schroeder wrote in the 3-0 ruling. “We do not lightly tolerate a prosecutor asserting as a fact to the jury something known to be untrue or, at the very least, that the prosecution had very strong reason to doubt.”

The panel stopped short of throwing the case out entirely, noting that “there was no question that Reyes signed off on stock-option grants that were priced retrospectively and that the backdating allowed Brocade to understate its compensation expenses.” So the United States attorney could opt to retry the case, though that seems a bleak option at this point given the tenor of the ruling.

“This is the highest profile [backdating] case they had that went to trial, so I’d expect they will try it again, if for no other reason than for reputational purposes,” Wayne State University law professor Peter Henning told the Mercury News. “But talk about a case that’s stale.”

Kumar alleges they were all aware of the infamous “35-day month” ploy for which he and eight other former CA (CA) officials took the fall. “Wang was not only aware of the accounting improprieties, such as the 35-Day Month, he also actively participated in concealing those improper accounting practices. … Wang knew that CA’s quarters were ‘open’ for five days into the next month per his directive, and he sometimes instructed CA to keep CA’s books ‘open’ after the usual ‘five days’ to execute license agreements and recognize revenue from those agreements in the previously ended quarters.”

Damning allegations and ones Wang, D’Amato, et al., vigorously deny.
Said a spokesman for Ranieri and D’Amato: “[Kumar] from jail continues to be a stranger to the truth.”