This Houston Chronicle article reports that Andrew Weissmann, the lead trial lawyer in the Enron Task Force‘s Arthur Andersen obstruction of justice prosecution, is replacing Leslie Caldwell as lead lawyer for the task force. Ms. Caldwell will soon leave the Department of Justice to enter private practice.
The Chronicle piece fawns over the accomplishments of the Enron Task Force, but my sense is that the Task Force has been much more heavy handed than successful to date. Although over two years old now, the Task Force has tried precisely one case. In that case, it obtained a controversial conviction of Arthur Andersen on obstruction of justice charges, and that conviction is currently under review by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Task Force has entered into nine plea bargains with various ex-Enron employees, but all of those have come after multiple count indictments that left those defendants with a Hobsen’s Choice of either risking trial and the prospect of what amounts to a lifetime prison sentence or copping a plea for a relatively light sentence. As noted in this prior post, this Task Force approach to the Enron criminal cases is troubling — the government’s job is to indict and convict wrongdoers, not to sledgehammer citizens into plea bargains out of fear of unreasonably long prison sentences.