The US District Court for the District of Connecticut acquits six executives of aerospace engineering companies in a no-poach antitrust criminal prosecution (Mahesh Patel / Robert Harvey / Harpreet Wasan / Steven Houghtaling / Tom Edwards / Gary Prus)

In the latest setback in the Department Justice Antitrust Division’s (DOJ) attempts to prosecute “no-poach” agreements criminally, a federal judge acquitted from the bench all six defendant employees of aerospace engineering companies alleged to have allocated a labor market by agreeing not to hire from each other. In United States v. Patel, Judge Victor A. Bolden of the District of Connecticut granted defendants’ motion for a judgment of acquittal at the close of the DOJ’s case in chief. In its Ruling and Order, [1] the court held that the government had failed to show there was a “cessation of meaningful competition” in the purportedly allocated labor market, because there were numerous “exceptions” to the alleged agreement that ultimately permitted the hiring of employees. The