During opening arguments last week in the criminal trial of former key Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, Lay defense attorney Mike Ramsey made the following observation to the jury about the Enron Task Force’s indictment against the two men:
“This is the indictment . . .[It] is 66 pages long. Someday you may be called upon — God save you — to have to read it. If you do, you’ll find it is enormously complex. I don’t blame the [prosecutors] at the table here; I think their predecessors wrote it. But with all the power and precision of the English language, it is a babbling kind of indictment [that makes it] very hard to pin down, very hard to determine what you are actually charged with. . .”
Well, it turns out that that the Task Force pretty much agrees with Ramsey’s characterization of the indictment. In this motion that showed up on the docket of the case yesterday, the Task Force requests that U.S. District Judge Sim Lake not allow the Lay-Skilling defense to use the Task Force’s indictment during cross-examination of the Task Force’s witnesses in the trial because, among other things, to do so would risk “unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues [and] misleading the jury. . . ”
Not exactly a sterling self-endorsement of the Task Force’s writing skills, would you say? ;^)
Meanwhile, after the Task Force took almost all of Monday morning to complete direct examination of its first (and relatively minor) witness, Mark Koenig, cross-examination of Koenig continues today (Chronicle/Flood – Fowler; NY Times/Barrionuevo – Evans; WaPo/Carrie Johnson).
An amusing anecdote from the Enron trial
Courtesy of Tom Kirkendall.
Tom,
This seems like an awfully weak argument by the government. If you were the prosecutor, would you have made this filing? How do you think Judge Lake will rule?
My sense is that Judge Lake will deny the motion and then simply decide on a witness by witness basis whether it’s appropriate to allow the defense to use the indictment during cross-examination.