The prosecution rested Wednesday in the Enron Broadband trial, about five weeks after the beginning of the trial. Here are previous posts on the trial.
The trial has been a strange one. Looking like a tap-in for the prosecution at the beginning, the prosecution committed some early blunders, such as allowing its key witness to testify falsely regarding a video shown to the jury and then compounding that mistake by attempting to blame the error on a clearly intimidated woman who previously provided video services for Enron. At that point, the trial was looking really interesting.
Unfortunately, the fireworks did not last long. The trial quickly descended into mind-numbing boredom, noted here and here. Thus, when the Enron Task Force prosecutors advised U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore that they expected that it was going to take at least a week to ten days longer to complete presentation of their case-in-chief than they originally predicted, a jury rebellion nearly broke out. It’s exceedingly difficult to read if a jury is blaming the prosecution or the defense for such delays, but the lawyers on both sides accelerated examination of witnesses over the past week in an attempt to get the trial back on course. Inasmuch as the defense side of this type of case normally does not take as long as the lawyers originally predict, my sense is that the trial is back on track to conclude by late June.
Despite their early mistakes, the Enron Task Force prosecutors ended their case-in-chief by eliciting testimony about the “elephant in the courtroom” — i.e., the large amount of money that three of the former Enron executives-defendants made on stock sales during the period in which the prosecution alleges that they were making false public statements about Enron Broadband’s prospects. That is clearly the strength of the prosecution’s case, and expect the prosecutors to hammer that point again and again throughout the remainder of the trial.
The defense team begins presentation of their case today. Let’s hope they liven things up a bit.