Daily Archives: May 31, 2006

Enron Broadband jury splits the baby

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Kevin howard2.jpgmicheal krautz3.jpgThe jury in the first re-trial of the Enron Broadband case that ended in a mess of acquittals and a mistrial last year convicted former EBS CFO Kevin Howard (picture on the left) this afternoon on all five counts — three counts of wire fraud, two counts of falsification of books and records and conspiracy to falsify books and records. Howard’s co-defendant — former EBS accountant Michael Krautz — was acquitted on all counts. The previous posts on this case are here, including this recent one on the closing arguments of the trial.
U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore scheduled sentencing for the morning of September 11, 2006, the same day on which former key Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Sim Lake on the same floor of the Federal Courthouse in downtown Houston. Howard faces possible penalties of five years in prison on the conspiracy charge and each of the three wire fraud counts, and 10 years on the falsification of books and records count.
Given the unavoidable torrent of adverse publicity regarding all things related to Enron that has occurred since the Lay-Skilling jury returned its verdict last Thursday, it’s highly unfortunate that the re-trial of Howard and Krautz was not postponed until a reasonable period of time had passed after the completion of the Lay-Skilling trial. The freedom of a 43 year-old family man and father of two young children now hangs in the balance of that dubious decision.

The storms of Katrina

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katrina_box3.jpgWith hurricane season officially starting tomorrow, this NY Times article about the research that has been done over the past year into Hurricane Katrina provides some interesting information, including the stages of the storm on the New Orleans metro area:

The first stage of Hurricane Katrina touched Louisiana as it passed south of the city in the Plaquemines Parish town of Buras with winds of more than 125 miles per hour pushing a storm surge. The wind and water overwhelmed the local hurricane defenses: levees built to withstand 13 feet of water were overwhelmed by more than 17 feet of surge, damaging levees and scattering homes and boats across the thinly populated parish like toys.
As the hurricane moved across Lake Borgne to the east, the effect was quite different: the second storm sent strong waves and a surge estimated at 18 feet or more back across the lake to the levees bordering St. Bernard Parish. The long levees there had been designed to handle 13 feet of water. The assault washed over Chalmette and other communities with floodwaters exceeding 14 feet in some areas. A similar pounding took out the southeastern levee of the development known as New Orleans East.
In its third incarnation, the storm sent the water up a funnel formed at the northwest corner of Lake Borgne and into the city’s Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, where the water rose and churned with exceptional force, said Hassan Mashriqui, a researcher with the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. Those waters shattered flood walls in several places and destroyed the city’s Lower Ninth Ward.
As the storm pushed into Mississippi, it sent a final surge toward New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain, north of the city. As the water stacked up against the south shore of the lake, it rose against the walls of the three main drainage canals that run from the center of the city. Though the surge was weaker than the others and the water did not reach the tops of the flood walls, the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal suffered breaches that caused the lake’s waters to spill into the center of the city.

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The law clerks of SCOTUS

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US_Supreme_Court_Building.jpgThe ubiquitous Richard Posner reviews in this New Republic Online article (free registration req’d) two new books about the law clerks of the United States Supreme Court — Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise And Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk (Stanford 2006) and Sorcerers’ Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the United States Supreme Court (NYU Press 2006) — which provide a glimpse of how the modern Supreme Court operates. It’s an entertaining and informative review, reflected by the following blurb:

Except for Justice John Paul Stevens, who writes his own first drafts of opinions, law clerks write the first drafts of their justices’ opinions. (According to Courtiers, Stevens’s clerks rewrite his drafts extensively, thus producing an inversion of the normal relation of clerk-author to justice-editor. In another inversion, Justice Harry Blackmun, a genuine eccentric, left the opinion-writing to his clerks after his first years on the Court and concentrated on cite-checking their drafts. He was by all accounts an awesome cite-checker.) Some justices rewrite the clerks’ opinion drafts extensively, others little. Sorcerers’ Apprentices estimates that 30 percent of the opinions published by the Supreme Court are almost entirely the work of the law clerks; and as they are the primary drafters of most of the other opinions as well, probably more than half the written output of the Court is clerk-authored.

Judge Posner is particularly interested in whether the elaborate Supreme Court law clerk system has actually resulted in improvement in the quality of the Court’s decisions:

[O]ne can apply quality-related criteria, such as clarity, brevity, guidance provided to the lower courts, and candor in explaining the true grounds of decision, to the opinions in the two eras.
When one does this, one is not likely to find a dramatic, or perhaps any, overall difference in quality. Today’s opinions are longer–a dubious virtue. There are more separate opinions, most of which are ephemeral. Today’s opinions are more polished, more “scholarly,” and more carefully cite-checked, but these are modest virtues. Neither judges nor their clerks are scholars. The scholarly apparatus of judicial opinions belongs to the rhetoric rather than the substance of judicial decision-making.

Read the entire review.