5 reasons to applaud the smart, speedy jury that convicted the Trump Organization of tax fraud

• A Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump's company of all 17 tax-fraud counts on Tuesday.
• They cut through 10 days of math-dense testimony to reach what one called a 'common sense' decision.
• 'I think they did a great job,' said ex-DA Cy Vance, who brought the original case against Trump Org.

They did the math — and there was a lot of math.

Still, "it was common sense," as one juror told Insider afterward, not just hard evidence about dollars and cents, that led to Tuesday's verdict convicting Donald Trump's business empire of 17 tax-fraud charges.

Former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance noted that the jury took just 10 hours to cut through a mountain of tax documents and an alternate-reality defense in which nobody named Trump had the slightest notion of any illegality.

"I think that they did a great job," Vance said Friday.

Vance had a very personal reason to cheer these four women and eight men — he is the DA who brought the tax-fraud case before leaving office last year. Here are five reasons they also deserve respect from the public at large.

1) So many spreadsheets

There were 400 exhibits, some of them thousands of pages long, in evidence in the tax fraud case against the two Trump subsidiaries that were on trial for six weeks in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. Those subsidiaries were Trump Corporation, which employs his top executives, and Trump Payroll Corporation, which cuts the paychecks for all of his employees. Both do business as the Trump Organization.

To access these stacks of documents during deliberations, jurors were given a single laptop loaded with trial evidence and nothing else — certainly not internet access.

Company memos, tax forms, and general ledgers could be projected from that laptop onto what the middle-aged defense lawyers at one point referred to as a "television" screen, which was not quite the right word.

Ratings would be low, in any event, as it only showed what to many would seem the most mind-numbing single channel ever. The jurors deserve kudos for not getting lost in that mountain of evidence.

2) Corporate liability law — huh? 

Jurors found that the two subsidiaries were criminally liable for the actions of Trump's two longtime top financial executives, ex-CFO Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney, who handled the payroll and tax reporting.

Finding that Weisselberg and McConney broke the law was the easy part.

The two men admittedly ran a decade-long payroll fraud scheme that saved millions of dollars in taxes for a half-dozen second-tier executives, who took big chunks of their pay in the form of luxury cars, apartments, and big-dollar bonuses. These plums were carefully logged as compensation but never claimed on company W-2 wage and tax statements.

But to convict under New York state's sparely-written corporate liability law, jurors needed to find that the two had more than just their own gain in mind in running the tax-dodge scheme.

They had to have also acted "in behalf of" the corporation, a wonky-sounding but vital component to the law.

With so much resting on those three little words, defense lawyers, prosecutors and the trial judge, state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, debated their meaning for nearly two months, even up to the moment the jurors were instructed on the law.

"It was central to the case," Trump Organization defense lawyer Alan Futerfas told reporters moments after the verdict.

The vagueness of the law, and how the words "in behalf of" were interpreted by the judge to the jury, will be central to an appeal, he said.

"Look, it will be an issue on appeal," Vance told Insider. "But I think the jury didn't have too much trouble with it," he added of the judge's instructions on corporate liability.

"I would have confidence that that is not going to get the verdict reversed on appeal," he said. "But it will be an issue."

3) Almost a slam-dunk case — but not quite

Weisselberg was forced to testify for the prosecution as part of a low-jail plea deal, but he drew a line in the sand during his three days on the witness stand.

He would describe his own wrongdoing 'til the cows came home. But he would not implicate anyone named Trump — not Donald Trump, who he worked for since the 1980s. And not any of Trump's three eldest kids — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, or Ivanka Trump, who have all served as Trump Organization executive vice presidents.

Instead, Weisselberg insisted on the stand that the Trumps were utterly in the dark about the decade-long scheme, despite having personally signed or initialed literally hundreds of its underlying memos, invoices, and bonus checks.

And Weisselberg told jurors some dozen times that he only ever intended to benefit himself in the scheme, denying prosecutors direct evidence of those crucial words, "in behalf of."

So in order to convict, jurors had to rely on the vast amount of indirect, or circumstantial, evidence, showing that Weisselberg acted with his boss's knowledge, if not outright blessing. And that, as prosecutor Josh Steinglass put it in closings, the tax-dodge scheme was an obvious win-win for Weisselberg and Trump. 

Had even one juror been a stickler, and insisted on a direct-evidence admission of "I did it to help the corporation, not just myself," the jury would have hung.

4) Donald Trump inspires strong feelings. Jurors put those aside.

Back during jury selection in late October, defense lawyers had the darnedest time finding Manhattan residents who didn't hate Donald Trump.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger noted that if they excused every prospect who said they had strong feelings about the former president, "we wouldn't be able to get a jury at all."

Ultimately, three of the chosen jurors —a full one-quarter of the jury — said during jury selection that they did not like Trump or his politics.

Almost all on the panel had said they had strong opinions that they did not characterize. But all of the jurors promised to be unbiased in weighing the evidence, and to keep any bias about Trump out of it.

They kept that promise, one juror told CNN.  They even referred to Trump as "Bob Smith" whenever they discussed the company owner.

And while they felt that Trump and his family "most likely" knew about the tax-fraud scheme, they understood that no one named Trump was on trial, just the company, the juror said.

5) The ultimate outsiders looking in

The jurors who convicted the Trump Organization — exposing Trump to a possible $1.6 million fine, the black eye of felony status for his company, and the possibility of a re-invigorated investigation into his business practices — came from a borough where just 12% voted for him in the last election.

But they were hardly coastal elites. At most, two or three had white collar jobs; the rest were middle-class retirees, retail and service industry workers, and at least one who said he was unemployed.

Most were people of color.

They certainly did not look like Donald Trump's C-suite of well-paid, white-collar white men. The jurors looked like New York City.