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.

Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy has been a harsh critic of Enron and its former key executives, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling.

In their motion to transfer venue of their upcoming criminal trial, Lay and Skilling have used Steffy’s past columns as examples of the biased and negative reporting in Houston that makes it far less likely that an unbiased jury can be found here than in, say, Denver, Phoenix or Atlanta.

In his column today, Steffy responds by conceding that he has been critical and mocking of Lay and Skilling, but arguing that jurors can put aside inflamed passions and biased reporting to render a verdict based solely on the evidence presented in court.

Besides, Steffy snipes, that Lay and Skilling are entitled to a fair trial does not mean that he shouldn’t be allowed to express his outrage in his columns over what happened at Enron.

Well, it’s pretty clear that Steffy has missed the point of Lay and Skilling’s use of his columns, which is not uncommon for someone who is promoting a certain view toward a case rather than a more balanced one.

Lay and Skilling’s pleadings never question Steffy’s right to express whatever viewpoint he wants in regard to Enron or their case.

Rather, Lay and Skilling’s point is that the Chronicle and local media’s almost total failure to provide a counterbalance to the one-sided views of those expressed by Steffy and others has greatly contributed to the overwhelmingly negative views toward Lay and Skilling that are expressed in the responses to the juror questionnaire that was transmitted to prospective jurors several months ago.

As noted many times on this blog, there does exist a different view toward what happened at Enron than that which Steffy shares with the vast majority of the mainstream media.

The problem is not with Steffy’s viewpoint. Rather, the problem is with the effect on potential jurors of the promotion of that viewpoint to the almost total excluson of the contrary view.

On a related note, Larry Ribstein and Thom Lambert (of the terrific new blog, Truth on the Market) comment on the effect of bloggers expressing balancing views to those of the mainstream business media.