It is currently the calm before the storm that will be the trial of the legacy case of the Enron Task Force — that is, the criminal trial of former Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Richard Causey that is scheduled to begin in mid-January, 2006.
In that connection, this Washington Post article discusses the extensive questionnaire that was recently sent to prospective jurors in the Lay-Skilling-Causey trial, which has taken on added importance because of the extensive evidence of jury pool bias against all things related to Enron that the Lay-Skilling-Causey defense team has submitted to U.S. District Judge Sim Lake. Judge Lake declined to grant the defense’s motion to change the venue of the trial out of Houston, but he has supported the defense’s desire to have a more extensive questionnaire than the Task Force desired.
Meanwhile, in this the Conglomerate blog post, David Zaring addresses the important question of how does one make a case as complex as the one against Messrs. Lay, Skilling and Causey understandable to a jury? The Task Force already stumbled badly on that score in the trial of Enron Broadband case, and recent indications are that the Task Force is having similar problems in the preparation of its case against Messrs. Lay, Skilling and Causey. A reflection of that is the recent change that the Task Force has taken in regard to Arthur Andersen. Not only did the Task Force previously demonize Andersen in connection with prosecuting the firm out of business, the Task Force named Andersen as a co-conspirator in connection with various Enron criminal cases. However, the Task Force is changing its tune toward Andersen in regard to the Lay-Skilling-Causey prosecution, as prosecutors now recognize that relying on the testimony of admitted criminals such as Andy Fastow and Ben Glisan may not be particularly persuasive to a jury. So, the Task Force is currently listing several former Andersen partners as prosecution witnesses and, in so doing, contending that Andersen was duped by Enron and not really a co-conspirator with Enron, after all. It remains to be seen whether the Task Force can explain to a jury why it prosecuted Andersen out of business at an earlier stage of the Enron case when it is now contending that the firm was simply duped by Enron like everyone else.