What is the presumption in the Lay-Skilling trial?

presumed innocent.jpgChronicle business columnist Loren Steffy responds to this weekend post on the high price of asserting innocence and hindsight bias in prosecutions of corporate agency costs by urging us to remember the supposed lies that Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling told in regard to Enron.
Steffy is a talented writer and has consistently pulled no punches in expressing his belief that Lay and Skilling are guilty, although his guilty verdict at this point in the trial is a bit difficult to square with this prior column. In fact, Steffy’s blog post reminded me of this funny story about one of my experiences on jury duty. Still, I admire Steffy’s honest stance more than the disingenuous positions taken by some in the media, who cloak an anti-Lay-Skilling bias with a transparent jacket of objectivity.
In the Lay-Skilling trial, the prosecution is only through about a third to 40% of its case in chief. Four out of the five substantive prosecution witnesses to date have testified under agreements with the prosecution in which they hedged the risk of a long prison sentence and loss of virtually all of their net worth in return for their testimony against Lay and Skilling. Moreover, the prosecution’s case to date bears little resemblance to the highly-publicized indictment and related charge pleadings against Lay and Skilling, and the prosecution has gone to great lengths to chill witnesses from testifying who have potentially exculpatory testimony for Lay and Skilling. Meanwhile, Lay and Skilling patiently wait for the opportunity to tell their side of the story.
Against that backdrop, Steffy has already decided that Lay and Skilling are guilty. That’s his perogative, but I prefer to view Lay and Skilling as innocent until the entire story is told and the prosecution has proven — beyond a reasonable doubt — that these men are guilty of a crime.

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