Now, I know this is going to be a long trial, and I've talked to George Ryan about how we want to proceed. He and I have decided that we are going to try this case in the courtroom. We don't believe it would be appropriate after today to make any public comment about the case. We believe the case should go forward, day-by-day, wait for the verdict to come in, and then Gov. Ryan and I will then have a comment to make at that point in time. |
That's a huge problem for the government; they don't have a witness. |
The department heads, they decided whether they liked it, that was their job. |
The government keeps changing its remedies on a day-to-day basis. |
The non-settling states have completely failed to prove their case. |
The state of Illinois didn't get cheated out of anything. Providing benefits to supporters is part of politics and is not a crime. |
There are some people who believe that things like presumption of innocence are kind of legal technicalities and aren't really important. |
There's 13 teams left in Division I in New York state, and we're one of them. |
There's no doubt that George Ryan was a politician. He lived in the imperfect world of politics. |
These are very serious charges. What (Ryan) has at stake is his freedom, his reputation and his financial future. |
This is a verdict in favor of no one and it will not have any practical impact on Philip Morris and its employees. |
This is going to be a long trial. It's going to last several months. One thing I'm confident of is at the end of the day, after the jury's heard all of the evidence, they will find and see that George Ryan is not guilty of all charges in this indictment. |
This is unfolding as we speak. |
Those were huge positives throughout the season and then going three games into the state tournament, that's big, too. |
We are going to begin working immediately on post-trial motions to get this verdict overturned. |