The jury rejected the good faith motive. Accordingly, the jury could only have convicted him on this count if it believed that his conduct was a response to the stream of benefits. Ryan suggests that the only "private gain" he received for his intervention in this transaction was the approval of his friend. As explained earlier, however, the jurors must have rejected this argument; they were specifically instructed that if the benefits Ryan received from Warner were merely the proceeds of a friendship, they could not be the basis for a conviction. The court concludes that the jury must have found Ryan accepted gifts from Warner with the intent to influence his actions.

In April the US Supreme Court [official website] had ordered [JURIST report] the appeals court to reconsider Ryan's appeal in light of Wood v. Milyard [SCOTUS blog backgrounder; JURIST report]. The court in issued [JURIST report] a public apology in 2008 for the crimes that resulted in his imprisonment. He was placed in a federal prison to serve a six-and-a-half-year sentence [JURIST reports] on corruption charges. His trial began [JURIST report] in 2005 on 22 counts of corruption and fraud.