Although not as well-known as John Emshwiller of the Wall Street Journal and Kurt Eichenwald of the NY Times when it comes to covering the Enron scandal, Carrie Johnson of the Washington Post has been doing some of the best and most balanced reporting on Enron, and she scores again today with this interesting article profiling the Enron Task Force prosecution team that will be handling the upcoming trial of the Task Force’s legacy case against former key Enron executives, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling.
Ms. Johnson notes that the stakes are high for the prosecution team, which has had a decidedly better record in cutting plea deals than in actually obtaining convictions in court:

For all its success in dealmaking, the task force’s record when it takes cases to a jury has been mixed.
The trial last year of former executives in Enron’s broadband Internet unit dragged on for three months under the weight of testimony about the division’s technological capabilities. The case ended in a hung jury in July. Weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously tossed out the government’s groundbreaking conviction of audit firm Arthur Andersen LLP because of faulty jury instructions. Both cases were prosecuted by the task force, but lawyers involved in the coming Lay trial had little involvement in investigating those defendants.

The prosecution team is led by 38-year-old Chicago lawyer Sean Berkowitz, who replaced the controversial Andrew Weissmann as Task Force director at the conclusion of the Enron Broadband trial in July of last year. Interestingly, it appears that the prosecutors on the Task Force trial team in the Lay-Skilling case did not have much to do in preparing the sweeping indictment against Lay and Skilling, which may explain why the prosecution is narrowing its case against the defendants as the commencement of the trial approaches.
Even with such narrowing, however, the Chronicle’s Mary Flood reports that the Task Force is currently predicting that it will take over two months for the prosecution to present its case in chief in the Lay-Skilling trial. Such predictions are notoriously speculative, but two months is a long time to present a case and poses a substantial risk of juror rebellion.