U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson issued the order without explanation late in the day, hours after the U.S. Attorney's Office requested it in a court filing.
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Prosecutors also offered no explanation for their surprising decision to seek a lower fine against PG&E after more than a month of testimony at trial and four days into jury deliberations.
Jurors are deciding whether the company is guilty of multiple charges filed following the 2010 blast that sent a giant plume of fire into the air, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes in the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Bruno.
PG&E now faces a maximum fine of $6 million if convicted of 11 pipeline safety violations and obstructing investigators after the blast. No PG&E officials are facing prison time.
The potential $562 million fine was double the amount of money prosecutors said PG&E saved by skirting pipeline safety requirements. The utility argued in court filings that determining any savings would be complicated and unduly prolong a penalty phase of the trial.
Prosecutors may have been concerned that jurors would think they were asking for too much money and too much of their time to sit through a possible penalty phase, said Robert Weisberg, a criminal law professor at Stanford University.
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He said jurors might be so angry at prosecutors that they would side with the company on every count.
Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies corporate crime, said the larger fines the government was initially seeking are meant to act as a deterrent and prosecutors appeared to be giving PG&E "a massive and unexplained discount" in the revised proposal.
"Obviously, if a company does not have to pay a fine that is larger than its gains, then its crime becomes profitable," Garrett said.
During the investigation of the San Bruno blast, the San Francisco-based utility misled federal officials about the standard it was using to identify high-risk pipelines, prosecutors have said.
The standard PG&E used violated safety regulations and led to a failure to classify the San Bruno pipeline and others as high-risk and properly assess them, prosecutors said in a 2014 indictment.
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PG&E also was charged with violating pipeline safety laws after prosecutors alleged the company ignored shoddy record-keeping and failed to identify threats to its larger natural gas pipelines. The company did not subject the pipelines to appropriate testing, choosing a cheaper method to save money, prosecutors told jurors.
PG&E pleaded not guilty and said its employees did the best they could with ambiguous regulations they struggled to understand. Engineers did not think the pipelines posed a safety risk, and the company did not intend to mislead investigators, PG&E attorney Steven Bauer said during the trial.
The utility inadvertently sent officials a draft policy about its standard for identifying high-risk pipes, not one the company was actually following, he said.
Investigators have blamed the blast in part on poor PG&E record-keeping that was based on incomplete and inaccurate pipeline information. California regulators fined the company $1.6 billion last year for the explosion.