Word: enronization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...solid evidence that a crime has been committed." Said Lay attorney Mike Ramsey: "Clearly there's got to be a connection between business judgments and specific intent. That bright line is being erased by these prosecutions, and the Supreme Court and the appellate court are having none of it." Enron trial prosecutor Sean Berkowitz declined to offer comment to TIME on the ruling...
...ruling has put more attention on the instructions that Judge Simeon T. Lake ultimately will give to the jury in the Enron trial. "In the Enron trial there's going to be a battle royal over a jury instruction known as deliberate ignorance," says Houston attorney David Berg, author of The Trial Lawyer: What It Takes to Win. " In Lay and Skilling's case it's, 'I didn't know what was going on in the company.' Deliberate-ignorance jury instructions have held a person criminally liable when their denial of knowledge doesn't make sense. But now the judge...
...Other recent cases bolster that view as well. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a case directly related to Enron and Quattrone, in May of 2005 voided a witness-tampering conviction of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP by stating that the trial's jury was wrongly told it could convict the firm for shredding documents during the government's investigation of Enron even if Andersen employees believed they were not breaking the law. And Bernie Ebbers, former CEO of WorldCom, convicted last year on fraud charges in the financial collapse of the telecommunications company, is basing his appeal on similar...
...fast, says Sam Buell, a former member of the government's Enron Task Force that brought indictments against company executives, and now a visiting professor at the University of Texas-Austin. "They're sort of apples and oranges," argues Buell of the Quattrone and Enron cases; the Quattrone case involved blocking a grand jury investigation, while Enron concerns internal accounting fraud. Even in striking down Quattrone's conviction, he noted, the appeals court panel indicated there was enough evidence to convict if jury instructions had been proper...
...event, all eyes will be on the jury instructions in the Houston courtroom. "These twelve people who decide guilt or innocence are not legal scholars," says Enron trial analyst and Houston attorney Brian Wice. "The only law they take into the jury room is the law Judge Lake gives them...