Following on this earlier Wall Street Journal ($) profile, Mary Flood, who has been covering the Enron case for the Houston Chronicle, interviews Mike Ramsey, lead criminal defense attorney for Kenneth Lay, in today’s Chronicle. Not much of Mr. Ramsey’s insight on the Enron case is provided in the interview, although Mr. Ramsey does comment on Mr. Lay’s controversial strategy of vigorously defending himself in public statements, interviews, and press conferences from the criminal charges:

Q: Other lawyers have said you are taking risks in letting Lay speak publicly now and in demanding a speedy trial. Why have you chosen these strategies?
A: I think basically at the behest of Mr. Lay. I have been over the documents enough to know and trust that he is, in fact, innocent. But he has been silent for two and a half years, while he has suffered a lot in the press. I think it’s about time that he speaks out.
Now, it is a high-risk strategy in some cases to have a defendant testify. But Ken Lay is smart, he’s the master of the facts, he knows what happened, and I don’t have to go hold hands with him when he talks.

Another interesting comment comes after Mr. Ramsey explains why he decided to go into the practice of criminal law:

. . . [I]f there is a danger to the Republic, it comes from concentration of power in the hands of a few in Washington, not from an outside force of any sort. We’re impervious to that.
No one will topple America from the outside. But we may very well lose liberties internally. And if people are not willing to stand up and challenge the government, then the government continues to assume more and more power over us as individuals.
Until you see how vicious it becomes out on the point of a stick where it pierces flesh, you don’t understand how powerful the government really is and needs to be held in check.
And if there is any redeeming social value to the defense practice, it is that we are the people to whom it is given the high duty, I believe, to stand up and tell the government to go to hell when they need to be told that.
And this is such a case.
Q: Do you see the Enron Task Force as part of this potential growing evil?
A: Yes. I think that the constitution of any special group of prosecutors who pick their target before they do their investigation is dangerous and an aberration that shouldn’t be tolerated.