Citing misconduct by prosecutors, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ordered a new trial for Reyes, who had been convicted of 10 charges of conspiracy, fraud, making false regulator filings and falsifying records for backdating hundreds of employee stock options.

A favorable turn of luck for Reyes, who had been sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay a $15 million fine for misdeeds that, according to that three-judge panel, had been grossly exaggerated and perhaps even fabricated.

“Deliberate false statements by those privileged to represent the United States harm the trial process and the integrity of our prosecutorial system,” Judge Mary Schroeder wrote in the 3-0 ruling. “We do not lightly tolerate a prosecutor asserting as a fact to the jury something known to be untrue or, at the very least, that the prosecution had very strong reason to doubt.”

The panel stopped short of throwing the case out entirely, noting that “there was no question that Reyes signed off on stock-option grants that were priced retrospectively and that the backdating allowed Brocade to understate its compensation expenses.” So the United States attorney could opt to retry the case, though that seems a bleak option at this point given the tenor of the ruling.

“This is the highest profile [backdating] case they had that went to trial, so I’d expect they will try it again, if for no other reason than for reputational purposes,” Wayne State University law professor Peter Henning told the Mercury News. “But talk about a case that’s stale.”

According to news reports, in October 2007, the victim, Katherine Olson, 24 years old, responded to a help-wanted ad for a babysitter. She arrived to find Michael Anderson, who shot her in the back as she tried to leave. She was found in the trunk of her own car.

The prosecutor said that Mr. Anderson called himself “the Craigslist murderer” in conversations with other inmates.

Mr. Anderson pleaded innocent but was convicted on all counts, including first-degree murder. His attorney, Alan Margoles, argued that the shooting was accidental. He said he plans to appeal because he wasn’t allowed to use Mr. Anderson’s Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, as evidence in the case.

The conviction follows the late March killing of George Weber, a New York journalist whose attacker told police that they met through a Craigslist personal ad.

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