Daily Archives: May 2, 2006

The ugly case of Carl Wayne Buntion

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buntion_carl_wayne.jpgTexas has no shortage of ugly death penalty cases, and one of the ugliest is that of Carl Wayne Buntion.
Buntion had 11 felony convictions and had been in and out of prison multiple times at the time that he was passenger in a car stopped at the intersection of I-45 and Airline for a minor traffic violation on June 27, 1990. Buntion got out of the car and shot Houston Motorcycle Patrol Officer James Irby in the forehead with a .357-caliber Magnum, destroying Irby’s brain. Buntion contended that he was acting in self-defense.
During Buntion’s 1991 trial on capital murder charges, State District Judge William Harmon told the defendant that he was “doing God’s work” in making sure that he was executed. According to a subsequent law review article by Brent Newton: “Harmon taped a photograph of the ‘hanging saloon’ of the infamous Texas hanging judge Roy Bean on the front of his judicial bench, in full view of prospective jurors. Harmon superimposed his own name over the name ‘Judge Roy Bean’ that appeared on the saloon, undoubtedly conveying the obvious.” During the trial, Judge Harmon laughed at one of Buntion’s character witnesses and attacked an appeals court as “liberal bastards”and “idiots” after it ruled that he must allow the jury to consider mitigating evidence. Not surprisingly, Buntion was convicted and sentenced to death.
This past Friday, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt issued an opinion (downloadable here) overturning the conviction of Buntion. In the decision, Judge Hoyt found that Judge Harmon had deprived Buntion of his Constitutional right to a fair trial by bullying his lawyers, meeting privately with prosecutors and deferring to their wishes, hanging the Judge Roy Bean postcard from his bench, and by making remarks such as the “doing God’s work” one referred to above. Judge Hoyt concluded that, even before hearing the evidence, “Judge Harmon decided that Buntion was guilty and should die.”
The issues that arise from the Buntion case are not ones with easy answers. However, as noted in this earlier post, the state’s administration of the death penalty is questionable enough without questions arising in regard to the independence of the judiciary in the process. Judge Hoyt’s decision in this troubling case is a powerful reminder of that truth.

The special problems of criminalizing agency costs

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Last week, I noted UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge’s excellent explanation of corporate agency costs and why shareholders deserve protection from theft, but not from risk-taking.

In this typically insightful post, University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein follows up on Bainbridge’s article and provides an equally lucid summary of the risks to justice and the rule of law that result from a policy of criminalizing corporate agency costs. After listing seven such problems, Professor Ribstein concludes as follows:

All of this means that in order to prosecute corporate agency costs we have necessarily given lots of discretion to prosecutors. The result is a potential prosecutorial agency cost problem that threatens to rival the corporate agency costs being prosecuted.

First Enron Broadband re-trial begins today

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EBS50.jpgThe three-month trial last year of five former Enron Broadband Services (nicknamed “EBS”) executives on fraud and insider trading charges ended in a disastrous mix of acquittals and a mistrial for the Enron Task Force. So, this time around, U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore has split the previous case into three seperate trials, and jury selection cranks up today in Houston federal court on another floor from the ongoing Lay-Skilling trial.
H’mm. I wonder whether any of those prospective jurors have heard about Enron over the past several months? ;^)
At any rate, in this first re-trial, Kevin Howard, the former EBS CFO, and Michael Krautz, the former EBS senior accounting director, will be tried together on four counts alleging that they conspired to commit wire fraud and falsify books and records in connection with a sale of video-on-demand profits. The Task Force contends that the sale was phony and was performed in order to inflate EBS earnings falsely. Howard and Krautz respond that the sale was an entirely legal and creative structured finance transaction that allowed EBS to generate earnings in an industry that was undergoing a huge shakeout amidst intense competition and fast-changing technology. The Sixth (yes, that’s sixth) Superseding Indictment against Howard and Krautz is here.
Well-known Houston criminal defense attorneys Jack Zimmerman and Jim Lavine represent Howard and Krautz is represented by Washington, D.C. lawyer Barry Pollack. The Task Force has assembled a new team to handle the re-trial of Howard and Krautz led by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Van S. Vincent of Nashville and Jonathan E. Lopez of Washington, D.C.
Initial estimates are that the re-trial will last about a month.