Disgraced New York City attorney Marc Dreier’s letter to his sentencing judge was quite interesting. His recent 60 Minutes interview is just as fascinating.
Dreier — who unquestionably stole over $400 million — received a lighter prison sentence than former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, who didn’t steal a dime.
There is a huge difference between what Marc Dreier did and what Jeff Skilling did. It reflects poorly on us that our criminal justice system cannot distinguish between the two.
The legal and business communities are still buzzing over U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s scathing refusal earlier in the week to approve the proposed $33 million "settlement" (i.e., sweep under the rug) between the SEC and Bank of America over that the Bank’s failure (at least transparently) to disclose to its shareholders the billions in bonuses that the Bank agreed that an insolvent Merrill Lynch was allowed to pay to its employees.
The 12-page decision is certainly worth a read. Judge Rakoff tears into into the SEC for contradicting its own guidelines in penalizing BofA shareholders rather than the executives and lawyers who supposedly approved the lack of disclosure. The settlement "does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality, in that it proposes that the shareholders who were the victims of the Bank’s alleged misconduct now pay the penalty for that misconduct." The Judge didn’t buy the SEC’s contention that this punishment will result in better management, characterizing it as "absurd." Sort of like the notion that the SEC can really police this type of thing in the first place.
Judge Rakoff goes on in his opinion to raise at least another half-dozen or so good questions about the proposed settlement. But there’s a couple more that I wish he’d asked.
A few years ago, former Enron chairman Ken Lay was prosecuted to death for promoting Enron to its shareholders even though he had a reasonable basis for believing that what he was saying about his company was true.
In contrast, the BofA executives and lawyers could not even offer the defense in a criminal fraud trial that the bad things they intentionally failed to tell BofA shareholders about the Merrill Lynch deal were immaterial.
So, isn’t it about time that somebody in the federal government acknowledge that it was a mistake to prosecute Ken Lay to death? And isn’t it about time that the government do something about this barbaric injustice?
As Congress contemplates an historic extension of governmental control in regard to health care finance, a couple of stories relating to the growth of unrestrained exercise of governmental power in another area grabbed my attention.
First, former Dynegy executive Jamie Olis was formally released from federal prison on Friday.
Along with the egregious prosecution of Arthur Andersen, the prosecution and barbaric sentencing of Olis represents a festering wound for anyone who believes in principles of limited government and innocence until proven guilty.
That the judicial system allowed the executive branch to bully Dynegy into serving Olis up as the initial sacrificial lamb of business corruption in the wake of Enron’s collapse is a frightening example of how little protection citizens have from dubious prosecutions. For whatever purpose, Olis remains on probation for another three years.
Meanwhile, reinforcing the point made above, Mary Flood reports that the Department of Justice — apparently with not enough to do in investigating the meltdown on Wall Street over the past year and a half — is actually considering another Enron-related prosecution of the disgraceful Nigerian Barge case, which has already resulted in the unjust imprisonment of four former Merrill Lynch executives for over a year before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out their convictions.
As noted in this post from over four years ago (!), the Nigerian Barge prosecution was baseless from the start and, as later developments revealed, trumped-up to boot. That this outrage is allowed to continue is yet another indication that many in the judiciary have ceded their role as an effective check on executive branch excesses.
Finally, the docket of the prosecution of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling now reflects that the deadline for Skilling’s motion for new trial based on pervasive prosecutorial misconduct has been extended to September 9th.
As noted in this previous post, a reasonable interpretation of the reason for the extensions of the deadline for Skilling’s motion is that the government has turned over massive amounts of exculpatory evidence that the Enron Task Force illegally withheld from Skilling’s defense team during the prosecution of Skilling and the late Ken Lay. Skilling’s Fifth Circuit-ordered re-sentencing that will reduce his inhumane 24-year sentence has been put off indefinitely pending disposition of his motion for a new trial.
The Olis, Nigerian Barge and Skilling prosecutions are the other side of the coin of what happened to Professor Gates.
What protection do we have that the same won’t happen to you and me?
When Bernie Madoff was sentenced a few weeks ago, my reaction was that it is utterly absurd to imprison a 72 year-old white collar criminal for 150 years. I mean, really — what’s the point?
Bernie Madoff’s 150-year prison sentence was an affront to the federal criminal justice system. . . .
I’ve been a professional federal sentencing consultant for more than 32 years. I have worked with hundreds of white-collar offenders over the past 25 years – Madoff, most recently – whose punishments dramatically increased in direct proportion to the government trumpets of justice, punishment and deterrence. Having lived through the past two decades of federal sentencing guidelines (no longer to be "presumed reasonable," ruled the Supreme Court this year), I know that the Madoff sentence was the crown jewel for the government.
In imposing sentence, however, the court ignored virtually all statutory sentencing principles and trumped the defunct federal sentencing guidelines. The sentence was imposed, acknowledged Judge Denny Chin, for symbolic purposes, which violates the supposed blindfolds of our nation’s justice system.
The sentence was, of course, within the law. But being within the law does not always mean a sentence is appropriate. Legal scholars will be hard-pressed to find a first-offender sentence of Madoff proportions – the maximum statutory term imposed on each count, to be served consecutively. [. . .]
The court’s responsibility is to deliver justice, not respond to emotional tactics. The Madoff sentence – with its "symbolic" justification – failed a big test. . . .
In the meantime, this even more egregious sentence of a man who didn’t steal a dime from his company or investors continues to fade from our society’s consciousness.
A truly civil society would find a better way.
Being generally an optimistic sort, I keep thinking that the financial crisis of the past year or so will eventually prompt the Houston Chronicle to reconsider its generally biased coverage of the demise of Enron over the past seven years.
After all, it’s not every day that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals concludes that a newspaper’s coverage of a particular event was a major factor in the creation of a presumption of community prejudice.
Nevertheless, the local paper’s recent coverage of disgraced financiers R. Allen Stanford and Bernard Madoff reflects that no such soul-searching is likely to emerge anytime soon down on Texas Avenue.
Take this recent Loren Steffy column in which he asks the following: “Why, then, does Madoff get a sentence six times that of [former WorldCom CEO Bernie] Ebbers or Enron’s Jeff Skilling?”
I mean, really. Is the answer to that question all that difficult?
Madoff turns himself in and admits from the outset that he was stealing money from investors for years by running a Ponzi scheme. Any wonder why he was hammered by the sentencing judge?
Ebbers was essentially convicted of covering up accounting fraud at WorldCom, but he at least put up a colorable defense that he was not responsible for such matters and had no knowledge of the fraud.
Moreover, Skilling wasn’t even accused of accounting fraud. He was convicted essentially of making too many rose-colored statements about Enron, notwithstanding that his belief in the truth of those statements was never seriously challenged.
Finally, neither Ebbers nor Skilling stole a dime from the investors of their respective companies. Yet, Steffy insists upon comparing them with the larcenous Madoff. who essentially stole tens of millions. The Greed Narrative prevails again.
But here’s my main point. Now that what happened to Enron has happened to numerous other trust-based Wall Street firms, shouldn’t the Chronicle be advocating that similarly aggressive criminal prosecutions be mounted against numerous executives of the Wall Street firms who made the same type of rosy statements about their wobbling companies as Skilling made about Enron?
Now, I don’t believe that there was widespread criminal fraud at Enron. The only true criminal fraud there was relatively small and isolated in Andrew Fastow’s Global Finance unit. Similarly, I don’t believe that there was widespread criminal fraud at the Wall Street firms that endured the same downward spiral that engulfed Enron.
But inasmuch as the Chronicle fanned the flames of criminal prosecutions against dozens of Enron executives and others involved in transactions with them, shouldn’t the Chronicle be taking the same position with regard to executives at the similarly-situated Wall Street firms?
Or at least shouldn’t the Chronicle be explaining why it threw dozens of Enron executives under the bus even though it now fails to advocate similar treatment for executives of the failed Wall Street firms?
It seems like the least that the local newspaper can do.
In this earlier post regarding former Enron Broadband CFO Kevin Howard’s recent plea deal, I predicted that the factual basis for the plea deal would barely describe wrongdoing, much less criminality.
Turns out I was right. Paragraph 14 of the plea agreement at the bottom of page 6 sets forth the factual basis of the deal.
That paragraph describes that Enron had told the market that its Broadband unit had great potential, but that it expected to lose at least $60 million for the year. Inasmuch as Enron’s prediction was turning out to be correct, Howard helped arrange a joint venture transaction that monetized a portion of Broadband’s lucrative deal with Blockbuster. Nothing unusual about that.
So, what’s the problem, you ask?
Essentially, the factual basis provides that Howard did not disclose to Enron’s auditor (Arthur Andersen) that Enron’s joint venture partner was not expecting to be a long-term partner in the joint venture, even though the partner verified by signing the joint venture agreement that it was not relying on any such expectation in connection with entering into the venture.
Nevertheless, the factual statement suggest that if Andersen had known that the partner was really not expecting to be in the venture for the long haul despite the terms of the written agreement, then the auditor may not have allowed Enron to account for the deal in a way that reduced the Broadband unit’s losses to the $60 million level that the company had projected and ultimately reported.
That’s the basis for a crime?
Frankly, U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore should have the same reaction to Howard’s proposed plea deal that U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes had to the equally vacuous deal that Enron Task Force prosecutors crammed down the throat of former Enron mid-level executive Chris Calger back in 2005. At least the DOJ ultimately threw in the towel on the stinky Calger plea deal.
Based on the foregoing, any business executive who engages in a transaction for the purpose of helping his company achieve earning projections is at risk of being indicted and convicted of a crime, and sentenced to a long prison sentence.
And by a long prison sentence, I don’t mean the 4-12 months of home confinement to which Howard agreed in his deal.
Remember, the foregoing transaction is one for which Jeff Skilling is currently serving 24 years in prison.
A truly civil society would find a better way.
With no valid case against former Enron Broadband CFO Kevin Howard, what was the Department of Justice to do?
Rattle the saber of the trial penalty and cut a deal.
On one hand, the deal appears to be an extraordinarily good one for Howard.
The DOJ has already run him through two financially and emotionally draining trials and related appeals, both of which resulted in embarrassing defeats for the DOJ. Had the DOJ been able to persuade a jury to make even a small portion of the charges stick (not particularly difficult in this anti-Enron environment), Howard would probably have been looking at doing between 5-10 years of prison time while appealing his convictions (believe me, there is precedent for that in the Enron-related criminal cases). So, serving four to 12 months of probation or home confinement doesn’t look too bad in comparison.
But on another level, the deal that Howard was forced to take stinks.
As with Jeff Skilling, Kevin Howard didn’t steal a dime from Enron and was simply trying to do the best job he could of preserving value in the company’s broadband unit under difficult market conditions.
Moreover, it’s not as if the unit didn’t have potential — Enron’s joint venture with Blockbuster was intended to bring video on demand to millions of households. Almost a decade later, this technology exists on cable and is quite similar to the technology used in Apple Computer’s popular iPod. This latter system is a elegant accommodation to copyrighted music and video programming in which artists are compensated and consumers have tremendously enhanced access to information and entertainment.
As Skilling testified during his trial, although Enron’s investment in its broadband unit turned out to be a loser, Enron’s bet on broadband had been the right one to make:
“And one last thing — I’ll make the last one argument for Broadband because people criticize me about Broadband, and I will take the criticism. We — certainly, we made a mistake. But it wasn’t big. I mean, it was a billion dollars. We invested a billion dollars in the Broadband business. If it had worked, it could have been worth $30 billion. It didn’t work. We lost a billion dollars, but if you can make those kinds of bets, that’s the kind of the risk you [should be taking] as a corporation. And if you do a lot of [deals with a] downside of a billion and upside of $30 [billion], you’re doing a good job for your shareholders in the long run, in my opinion. This one didn’t work.”
That, as Skilling noted, is the type of risk that management needs the freedom to take in order to create wealth for shareholders. Criminalizing those types of failed bets is a sure way to dampen the climate for wealth creation.
Thus, confronted with no evidence of criminal wrongdoing outside of Andrew Fastow’s relatively small Enron circle of friends, and under heavy political pressure to identify some Enron scapegoats, the Enron Task Force made up a crime against Howard and others. It turned out to be violation of the honest services wire-fraud statute under 18 U.S.C. § 1346.
However, there was a problem with the Task Force’s theory of criminal liability. Honest services wire-fraud is normally supposed to address the situation where a business executive takes a kickback or a bribe in violation of his fiduciary duty to his company. Howard wasn’t even accused of doing any such thing. In Howard’s case — as with the case against Skilling — the Task Force simply used those inapplicable charges as a means to appeal to juror resentment against anything having to do with Enron.
In reality, Howard was involved in representing Enron in the negotiation of legitimate business transactions that were evidenced by written agreements that provided that all agreements or representations between the parties that are not contained in the written agreements were void and unenforceable.
But that’s not what really happened, contended the prosecution — Howard entered into “secret side deals” that changed the risk allocation of the written agreements and eviscerated Enron’s accounting treatment of the transactions. The prosecution “paid” a couple of witnesses to testify against Howard by cutting favorable plea deals with them and “presto” — the DOJ had a colorable criminal case to pursue against Howard. Who cares whether the statute under which the prosecution is brought has nothing to do with the alleged crime?
Now, two expensive trials and related appeals later, Howard was confronted with the choice of, on one hand, admitting to a crime that he did not commit and a soft sentence or, on the other, a third trial and a draconian trial penalty.
Howard’s dilemma sheds light on the disparate burdens on civil and criminal defendants in business misconduct cases. While a defendant in a civil business misconduct lawsuit has protections against another party’s vexatious litigation tactics, those protections do not exist in a criminal business misconduct case against an unpopular businessman-defendant. Indeed, many of the Enron Task Force prosecutors who promoted these failed Enron-related prosecutions have gone on to lucrative careers in private practice.
Meanwhile, the damaged lives, ruined career, and destroyed wealth that lie in the wake of the prosecutions of Kevin Howard is tangible evidence of the enormous cost of such prosecutions.
The statement of facts upon which Howard’s plea is based is still not available online; I will post it when it is filed with the District Court. But my bet is that most of the statement will not even describe wrongdoing, much less criminal conduct.
During a time in which we ought to be thinking about how to create incentives for generating wealth and jobs, a truly civilized society would find a better way.
The attorneys for former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, which is quite interesting and is being widely reported in the mainstream media.
However, as interesting as a Supreme Court appeal is, that is not the most interesting aspect of the Skilling case right now.
But first the petition.
As usual, Skilling’s legal team at O’Melveny & Myers did an outstanding job in lucidly presenting why the Supreme Court should consider Skilling’s appeal.
In short, Skilling’s petition contends that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision in Skilling’s appeal made a mess of two key issues:
(i) application of the honest services wire fraud statute (18 U.S.C. § 1346) to Skilling’s actions, and
(ii) application of the standard for deciding the proper venue for Skilling’s trial in the face of a presumption of community prejudice against Skilling.
As noted previously, the Fifth Circuit panel’s decision in Skilling’s appeal failed to reconcile its reasoning in upholding Skilling’s conviction for honest services wire-fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1346 with earlier Fifth Circuit panel decisions on the same issue in the Nigerian Barge and Kevin Howard cases.
Inasmuch as there is now a clear split between Fifth Circuit decisions and other circuit appellate courts on the scope of honest services wire-fraud, the issue appears ripe for Supreme Court consideration. Indeed, Skilling’s petition notes Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s recent observation about the need for the high court to take up the issue:
“Without some coherent limiting principle to define what ‘the intangible right of honest services’ is, whence it derives, and how it is violated, this expansive phrase invites abuse by headline grabbing prosecutors in pursuit of local officials, state legislators, and corporate CEOs who engage in any manner of unappealing or ethically questionable conduct.” Sorich v. U.S., 129 S.Ct. 1308, 1310 (2009). [. . .]
There is a “serious argument” that, as Justice Scalia put it, “a freestanding, open-ended duty to provide ‘honest services’—with the details to be worked out case-by-case”—amounts to “nothing more than an invitation for federal courts to develop a common-law crime of unethical conduct.” Sorich, 129 S.Ct. at 1310. And because the notion that courts can “discover[]” whether conduct is criminal using common-law reasoning is “utterly anathema,” [cite deleted] there is an equally serious argument that § 1346 is unconstitutionally vague. [cite deleted].It should not be the task of federal courts to save a facially vague and unenforceable statute from itself. Only Congress can properly demarcate the boundaries of honest-services fraud. . .
Yeah, we know all about those “headline grabbing prosecutors,” don’t we?
The venue issue is even simpler. Skilling argues that the Fifth Circuit improperly allowed U.S. District Judge Sim Lake to rebut a presumption of community prejudice against Skilling through a superficial examination of individual jurors even though the Fifth Circuit concluded that Judge Lake had improperly failed to apply the presumption of community prejudice against Skilling. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling is at odds with several other circuit courts decisions that maintain that such a presumption simply cannot be rebutted, so that conflict between the circuits tees up another Supreme Court issue.
Frankly, given the extensive evidence of both pervasive media bias and prospective juror bias against Skilling, if the Supreme Court allows the Fifth Circuit’s decision to stand on the venue issue, then a denial of a motion to change the venue of a trial within the Fifth Circuit will no longer be grounds for an appeal.
But now for the more interesting developments in Skilling’s case.
Flying almost completely under the radar screen is the fact that the Fifth Circuit decision remanded a portion of Skilling’s case for two reasons.
First, the Fifth Circuit ordered Judge Lake to re-sentence Skilling because of an error that was made in applying a sentencing enhancement in assessing Skilling’s 24-year sentence.
Moreover, the Fifth Circuit decision invited Skilling to file a motion for new trial based on issues of prosecutorial misconduct. Specifically, the Fifth Circuit was particularly concerned about the failure of the Enron Task Force to comply with federal rules requiring the disclosure of exculpatory evidence to the defense from the Task Force’s pre-trial interviews with main Skilling accuser, former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.
Fastow testified at trial that he told Skilling about the Global Galactic agreement, which purportedly documented a series of illegal “side deals” between Fastow and former Enron chief accountant Richard Causey that guaranteed Fastow would not lose money on certain special purpose entities that he was managing. Skilling denied any knowledge of the purported agreement.
After Skilling’s conviction, the Skilling defense team discovered Fastow interview notes that the Enron Task Force had failed to disclose to the Skilling team prior to trial. Among other things, those notes revealed that Fastow had told the Task Force lawyers that he didn’t think he had told Skilling about the Global Galactic agreement. The Fifth Circuit characterized the Task Force’s non-disclosure as “troubling” in inviting Skilling to file a motion for new trial with the District Court.
So, where does the Fifth Circuit’s remand of the Skilling appeal stand in the District Court?
Well, a review of the District Court docket of Skilling’s criminal case reveals that Judge Lake originally scheduled Skilling’s resentencing for July 30th.
However, in a highly unusual move, Skilling and the prosecution filed a joint motion requesting Judge Lake to put off the re-sentencing indefinitely pending the filing of Skilling’s motion for a new trial, the prosecution’s response to that motion, and the Court’s disposition of the motion. Moreover, the parties requested that the deadline for Skilling’s motion be pushed back to July 10th, which Judge Lake approved.
So, what is going on here?
Could it be that Skilling’s team has discovered even more exculpatory evidence that the Task Force failed to disclose to the Skilling defense prior to the trial?
Could it be that the government’s current lawyers — who were not members of the now disbanded Task Force and who have little incentive to cover for their predecessors — are now finding themselves dealing with a serious failure of the Task Force members to comply with rules requiring the disclosure of exculpatory evidence to the defense in Skilling’s case?
Could the Skilling case be turning into something similar to this?
Stay tuned.
Inasmuch as what took place with regard to Enron earlier in the decade has now happened to much of Wall Street, the vacuity of the Houston Chronicle’s coverage of Enron-related matters has become clear.
Nevertheless, Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy still cannot work himself out of his small Enron shell.
Most recently, Steffy wrote this column in which he compares Sir Allen Stanford of the beleaguered Stanford Financial Group to former Enron executives, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling:
All this finger pointing should bring a strong sense of déjà vu to Houstonians, who watched Enron’s meteoric rise and fall, as well as the unsuccessful efforts of the late company chairman Ken Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling to plead ignorance of the company’s fraudulent accounting practices and blame any criminal behavior on the chief financial officer, Andy Fastow. . . .
If Stanford is any indication, the “I’m not a crook, I’m an idiot” defense for CEOs remains alive and well. For those who buy the idea that people who construct and direct massive financial enterprises are really dunces who haven’t a clue how they function, we’ve got a truckload of Enron shares to sell.
Of course, the foregoing is a complete misrepresentation of Skilling and Lay’s defense. Rather than contending that he did not know what was going on at Enron, Skilling contended that he was a hand’s-on manager over virtually all facets of Enron’s far-flung business operations. Similarly, Lay contended that he became intimately involved in day-to-day management of the company after re-taking the Enron CEO role when Skilling resigned unexpectedly in August, 2001. Thus, Skilling and Lay’s position was that they were totally engaged in Enron’s massive business operations, that there was no wide-ranging fraud, and that Enron’s trust-based business model failed when skittish post-9/11 markets became spooked over conflict-of-interest allegations regarding Fastow’s role in generally legitimate special purpose entities.
That’s a bit different than Sir Allen’s defense that "he left all the financial stuff" to Stanford Capital’s CFO James Davis, don’t you think?
Steffy has done this before in regard to Enron-related matters, so another misrepresentation isn’t really surprising. But what is troubling is the Chronicle’s continued promotion of Steffy’s simplistic world view in which most troubled businesses are seen as merely a vehicle by which greedy and unethical executives exploit helpless investors. Indeed, Steffy’s fatuous viewpoint casts complex business events as merely struggles by honest investors against bad executives. Not only does this viewpoint ignore reality, it provides Steffy comfort by allowing himself to feel morally certain and superior to those he is belittling, while saving himself from the hard work of performing any serious analysis.
Morality plays are comfortable and easy to tell. The truth is more nuanced and harder to explain. In choosing to take the easy way out, the Chronicle and Steffy have forfeited the opportunity to provide a valuable service to investors and businesspeople by furthering understanding on such key subjects as the importance of hedging risk and the fragile nature of trust-based businesses.
That type of understanding sure would have come in handy for many investors in Wall Street firms over the past couple of years.
April 30, 2009 Update: Loren Steffy responds here and points out that the quote that I used above is from a Chronicle editorial that he did not write. For that error, I apologize.
However, Steffy’s related column here makes the same misrepresentation regarding Ken Lay’s defense and Steffy’s blog post continues to fail to respond to the misrepresentation.
Some things never change.
Joe Weisenthal and Henry Blodget over at Clusterstock have been all over the breaking story yesterday that, as many of us suspected, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and perhaps other governmental officials threatened Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis and the BofA board if the bank exercised its right to terminate the Merrill Lynch acquisition based on a material change in Merrill Lynch’s financial condition.
Of course, this is not the story that Lewis and Paulson were telling to BofA shareholders. They were assuring the shareholders that the Merrill Lynch acquisition was a great deal for BofA.
A few years ago, former Enron chairman Ken Lay was prosecuted to death for promoting Enron even though he had a reasonable basis for believing that what he was saying about his company was true. In contrast, neither Lewis nor Paulson could even offer the defense in a criminal fraud trial that they thought that the good things that they were telling BofA shareholders about the Merrill Lynch deal were true. We now know that they knew that the assurances were false.
This is not to suggest that Paulson or Lewis should be prosecuted for criminal fraud. They were in an extremely difficult situation — they and others were concerned that the U.S. and world financial system might collapse if the markets became spooked by BofA backing out of the Merrill Lynch deal. I didn’t agree with that concern, but I understood the position of those that did. They may have been correct. At this point, we’ll never know for sure.
However, regardless of whether that view was correct, neither Paulson nor Lewis should be prosecuted for a violation of criminal law for their actions. Although they made false statements to the markets regarding BofA’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch, there is no question that they thought what they were doing was essential to saving the financial system and firms such as BofA.
If their actions make them responsible for damages to BofA shareholders, then let that liability be sorted out in civil court where liability can be allocated fairly to everyone who had a hand in causing those damages. What’s to be gained by throwing them in prison? They simply were not operating on the same fraud plane as Bernie Madoff.
But here is my other point — Ken Lay was prosecuted to death for conduct that was not even intentional. Now that what happened to Enron has happened to many of the biggest and most prestigious Wall Street firms, isn’t it about time that somebody in the federal government acknowledges that what was done to Ken Lay was a massive injustice?
And in the meantime, isn’t it about time that this barbaric injustice be rectified, too?