WSJ News Exclusive | Inside a Jury’s Five-Hour Journey to Convict Nikola’s Trevor Milton

The jurors’ account of the deliberations, which took place behind closed doors, sheds light on the complexities facing juries tasked with applying the law in white-collar criminal cases, where a crucial question is often not a defendant’s conduct, but his state of mind at the time an act was committed.

“You get a multibillionaire up there, and [on the jury] you get working people, retired people, people of all walks of life,” said juror Elyse Stringer, 61 years old, who lives in Westchester County, N.Y. “It was very difficult to understand where Trevor was coming from.”

The case centered on allegations that Mr. Milton ripped off investors—and made himself a billionaire—by repeatedly lying about Nikola’s progress in developing zero-emissions trucks and the hydrogen fuel needed to power them. Mr. Milton’s lawyers argued that he didn’t intend to defraud anyone and have said they would keep fighting.

The three jurors said they found testimony from Nikola employees compelling, particularly when company executives said they warned Mr. Milton against making rosy pronouncements about Nikola on social media and in interviews. Two of the jurors said they were far less persuaded by Mr. Milton’s sole defense witness, a Harvard University professor of securities law who testified that Mr. Milton’s statements didn’t affect Nikola’s stock price. The economist talked down to the jury, they said.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and

Marc Mukasey,

a lawyer for Mr. Milton, declined to comment.

Around 11 a.m. on a Friday, a court officer locked three men and nine women into a jury room, leaving them to decide Mr. Milton’s fate. “It was kind of a mess,” said juror Margaret Gerrity, 66, a bookkeeper who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Nobody knew what to do.”

Each juror sat at a desk, spaced 3 feet apart and arranged in a circle. Juror Jennifer Diroche, 33, a safety director who lives in the Bronx, said she wrote the four counts on a large whiteboard.

The first securities-fraud count, the three jurors said, was relatively straightforward. They said the jury believed it only needed to find that Mr. Milton’s conduct met one of three criteria in that count, simplifying the discussions.

“That’s why it was so easy to all come to a unanimous conclusion,” said Ms. Stringer, the jury’s foreperson, who is retired and previously worked for an institutional investment adviser.

The three jurors said there weren’t detailed discussions on the first securities-fraud charge about the intent behind Mr. Milton’s actions, though the judge had said they needed to find Mr. Milton acted with an intent to defraud.

On count three, a wire-fraud charge, the women said jurors easily agreed that Mr. Milton was guilty.

Count four, another wire-fraud charge, was trickier, they said. Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Milton lied to a businessman about Nikola’s technology to persuade him to accept company stock options as payment from Mr. Milton for a Utah ranch. The jury found the businessman unlikable and unsympathetic, they said.

The businessman and his lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Stringer said she and another juror were initially holdouts on convicting Mr. Milton of the offense. She found it hard to believe that the businessman accepted Nikola stock based on Mr. Milton’s claims about the company instead of doing his own research or a simple Google search about Nikola’s prospects.

“I got a couple of faces from people,” she said. “It’s the guy’s life on the line.”

After some tense exchanges, Ms. Stringer said she voted guilty. The second holdout, who had a heavy accent and some trouble communicating his views in English, then voted guilty as well, she said.

That left count two, the second securities-fraud charge. Complicating matters, jurors thought they needed to consider the issue of criminal intent differently on that charge than the prior securities-fraud count, Ms. Gerrity said.

Yes, the judge’s instructions on the first securities-fraud charge told the jury to consider whether Mr. Milton had acted “knowingly, willfully and with an intent to defraud,” Ms. Gerrity said. But the written instructions for the second charge were presented in a slightly different way, with the term “criminal intent” emphasized in bold as a header on one of the pages, she said.

“It was definitely that phrase that was a big hangup,” Ms. Gerrity said.

Jurors found it hard to know what was in Mr. Milton’s head, the women said.

Only Ms. Gerrity thought that Mr. Milton had intended to deceive, they said. The other 11 jurors wanted to find him not guilty.

“We thought that he didn’t have an intent to harm,” said Ms. Diroche.

“We think he had good intentions with Nikola,” said Ms. Stringer. “It just didn’t come into fruition as quickly as he wanted to. That made him do unsavory things to get it done. But the criminal part of it? We didn’t feel it was anything criminal.”

The women said one juror needed to leave at 5 p.m. Ms. Diroche said she couldn’t come back the next Monday, which would have meant calling in an alternate and starting fresh the next week. Ms. Gerrity said she feared introducing a new juror could have led to a full acquittal of Mr. Milton.

“Eleven to one is really hard,” Ms. Gerrity said. She caved, dropping her vote to convict on that charge so the jury could wrap up. “At first I was relieved, and then I was super angry that I hadn’t been stronger,” she said.

Just after 4 p.m., Ms. Stringer read the verdict in court as Mr. Milton shook his head and his wife cried.

Some former prosecutors said the jurors may have misunderstood the law, because criminal intent was a required element for conviction on both securities-fraud counts.

“The intent requirements of count one and two are essentially the same,” said

Edward Imperatore,

a former Manhattan federal prosecutor now at Morrison & Foerster LLP. He said the two wire-fraud counts also required criminal intent.

“If they didn’t find criminal intent, they should have acquitted him for every count,” Mr. Imperatore said.

The law largely insulates jury verdicts from being attacked on appeal based on what was said during jurors’ deliberations.

“It’s the attorneys’ and the court’s job to ensure that the instructions are clear,” said

Joshua Margolin,

a partner at Selendy Gay Elsberg PLLC. “But even with the best efforts, juries sometimes can misinterpret or misunderstand, through no fault of anyone.”

Ms. Diroche and Ms. Gerrity said they researched Mr. Milton after the trial, including watching an episode of CNBC’s “American Greed” profiling the former executive, and regretted not convicting him on all charges.

“He should have been guilty on all four,” Ms. Diroche said. “Is there a way to tell the judge like, ‘Hey, can we take this back and do it over?’”

—Ben Foldy contributed to this article.

Write to Corinne Ramey at [email protected]