Following up on a post on this blog from a couple of weeks ago, the WSJ’s ($) Paul Davies and David Reilly report on how the shadow of former Dynegy executive Jamie Olis is hovering over the pending criminal proceedings against 16 former KPMG LLP executives in New York. Larry Ribstein and Peter Lattman comment on the issues confronting the former executives in attempting to obtain a fair trial after the prosecution browbeat KPMG to stop paying for their defense.

As I’ve noted before, we are still too close in time to the barbaric treatment of Olis to be able to comprehend the full implications of that case. How many innocent business executives pled guilty to crimes that they did not commit out of fear of an Olis-like sentence? I suspect more than a few.