This earlier post noted the 180 that the Enron Task Force has recently taken in regard to defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen. After demonizing the firm, gutting it with a misguided prosecution, and alleging that a number of the firm’s former partners were co-conspirators in several Enron-related prosecutions, the Task Force is now embracing several former Andersen partners as prosecution witnesses in its upcoming legacy trial against former key Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Richard Causey. In short, after putting Andersen out of business as an accomplice of the evil Enron, the Task Force is now contending that Enron duped Andersen just like everyone else.
On the heels of that development, David Duncan, the former Andersen partner-in-charge of the Enron account at the time of the company’s demise, earlier this week requested — without opposition from the Enron Task Force — that U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon allow him to withdraw his previous guilty plea under this cooperation agreement for allegedly obstructing the federal investigation of Enron. Duncan had testified — albeit ineffectively — during the Andersen trial in 2002 as a Task Force witness against Andersen, and has been awaiting sentencing ever since.
Meanwhile, the Task Force also requested dismissal of its criminal case against Andersen after publicly stating that it was prepared to retry the case just a couple of weeks ago. As a result, the Task Force will not be providing an “Andersen annuity” for Andersen defense attorney Rusty Hardin after all.

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Is it just me or does anyone else find it odd that this USA Today article is doing a better job of covering the prosecutorial abuse that is taking place in the Enron-related criminal cases than supposedly more thorough national newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal?
Following up on this post from over the weekend, the USA Today article notes the utterly absurd and abusive tactic of the Task Force in fingering about 100 unindicted co-conspirators in its legacy case against former key Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Richard Causey. The transparent purpose of the tactic is twofold:

First, to suppress exculpatory testimony in favor of the defendants from the unindicted co-conspirators, all or whom have declined to testify under their Fifth Amendment privilege out of fear of being indicted; and
Second, to have the testimony of the Task Force’s own witnesses about the alleged hearsay statements of the unindicted co-conspirators introduced into evidence as an exception to the hearsay rule. Not surprisingly, most of the Task Force’s witnesses are “cooperating witnesses” — i.e., former Enron executives who attempting to reduce their prison time by testifying against the defendants pursuant to plea bargains with the Task Force.

Of this tactic, the USA Today article notes the comments of Stanley Twardy, a former U.S. attorney who is now a defense lawyer in Connecticut, that “‘extremely rare’ for a case to have as many unindicted co-conspirators as [the Lay-Skilling-Causey] case does. It’s unusual to have them at all outside of drug and Mafia cases.”
As noted in this other post from over the weekend, the Task Force’s tactic has already resulted in a grave injustice in the Nigerian Barge case, where four Merrill Lynch executives are now serving prison terms because large amounts of exculpatory testimony for the defendants never came into evidence at trial. To avoid the same injustice from occurring in the Lay-Skilling-Causey trial, Judge Sim Lake should give the Task Force a deadline in which to indict any of the unindicted co-conspirators against whom the Task Force has a viable case, and then grant immunity from prosecution for all of the remaining unindicted co-conspirators. Only with such key testimony will the jury be able to sort out the truth of the Task Force’s allegations that the defendants engaged in criminal wrongdoing at Enron. Without such testimony, the jury will be deliberating on nothing more than the Task Force’s fictional screenplay of the defendants’ role in Enron’s demise.