CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Donald L. Blankenship, a titan of the nation's coal industry whose approach to business was scrutinized and scorned after 29 workers were killed at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2010, was convicted Thursday of a federal charge of conspiring to violate mine safety that stemmed from the accident, the deadliest in U.S. mining in decades.
The verdict reached by a federal jury here made Blankenship, 65, the most prominent U.S. coal executive ever convicted of a charge connected to the deaths of miners. He was accused of conspiring to violate mine safety regulations, as well as of deceiving investors and regulators; prosecutors secured convictions on one of the three charges. Blankenship was acquitted of acquitted of making false statements and securities fraud, but still faces prison time.
Although Blankenship, a former chief executive of Massey Energy Co., could claim a measure of victory, his lawyers said that they would appeal the verdict, which came after a trial that began with jury selection on Oct. 1. Jurors started deliberations on Nov. 17 after the defense rested its case without presenting any witnesses.
The jury of eight women and four men was not asked to decide directly whether Blankenship was guilty or not guilty in the deaths of the 29 miners at Upper Big Branch in 2010. Investigators said the deaths occurred after flammable gases that had been allowed to accumulate in the mine exploded.
Instead, prosecutors constructed a case that accused Blankenship of putting his pursuit of profit, for himself and his company, ahead of the safety of the miners who worked for him.
Jurors heard descriptions of Blankenship's fortune — he was paid nearly $18 million in 2009, the last full year before the explosion at the West Virginia mine just about everyone called "UBB" — and they saw documents that portrayed him as a manager with intricate knowledge of the operations of his multibillion-dollar company. They learned about his demands for production reports from Upper Big Branch every 30 minutes, even on weekends, and they heard him, on audio recordings, chastising and lecturing subordinates.
Perhaps most importantly, they heard dueling interpretations of an array of memos and programs about safety at Massey, a company that had thousands of safety citations. The government insisted that Blankenship and Massey had embarked on little more than a safety charade.
"Every time you hear 'hazard elimination,' you should be thinking 'propaganda,'" the U.S. attorney, R. Booth Goodwin II, told jurors in his closing argument. "Every time you hear 'Massey,' you should be thinking: 'defendant's criminal conspiracy to break the law and run coal.'"
But Blankenship's lawyers said that he had urged lower-ranking executives to reduce violations and that he had approved investments and purchases that improved safety in a dangerous industry. Moreover, they said that Massey's safety record was not nearly as grave as prosecutors made it seem.
"The citations you're hearing about are not crimes," William W. Taylor III, one of Blankenship's lawyers, said on Nov. 17. "You can take all of this paper and look at it as long as you want and you will not find the word 'willful' in any of the citations."
The government, Taylor said, had prosecuted a case that relied on misinformed assessments of documents, faulty testimony and a heavy dose of personal animus toward a man who was powerful but hardly revered.
"We don't convict people in this country on the basis of maybes," said Taylor, who led a defense team that, in a risky legal strategy, chose not to call any witnesses. "We don't convict them of crimes because they're rich or rude or they're tough."
The case, which was tried more than five years after the mine accident, was one of extraordinary political, legal and emotional significance in West Virginia, a state where many residents have long believed that coal companies and their leaders face only cursory scrutiny.
The terrain shifted with Blankenship's indictment last fall, days after authorities reached an agreement that gave immunity to Christopher L. Blanchard, the president of the Massey subsidiary that ran Upper Big Branch.
Blankenship, a Republican who exerted wide influence on West Virginia politics through large contributions, believed that his prosecution amounted to partisan revenge.
But even as Goodwin dismissed those claims in his closing argument, he seemed to know that suggestions of political interference by the Obama administration could resonate with jurors.
"I was not," he said, "ordered to do anything by the president of the United States."
Instead, he argued later, Blankenship "pushed and he pushed and he pushed, and laws were intentionally broken."
That did little to assuage Taylor, who spent days cross-examining government witnesses like Blanchard in sessions that sometimes made them seem like speakers for the defense.
"He's not guilty," Taylor said, "and we never should have been here in the first place."