A federal jury found California’s largest utility guilty of violating pipeline safety regulations before a deadly natural gas pipeline explosion in the San Francisco Bay Area and then misleading investigators about how it was identifying high-risk pipelines.

After deliberating for seven days, jurors convicted Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Tuesday of obstruction and five of 11 counts of pipeline safety violations, including failing to gather information to evaluate potential gas line threats and deliberately not classifying a gas line as high risk.

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Robert Weisberg, a criminal law professor at Stanford University, said the larger potential penalty would have pushed the trial into a second phase with an uncertain outcome.

“The government needed a felony conviction to act as a deterrent and stigma,” Weisberg said. “I think it got out of this what it wanted.”