Houston – Trying to sum up one of the era’s most complicated business trials in six hours is a gargantuan task.
But that’s exactly what prosecutors and defense lawyers will struggle to do as final arguments in the fraud trial of former Enron Corp. leaders Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling begin today.
Over 16 weeks, the jury heard competing descriptions of the misfortunes that befell the Houston energy-trading company and the reasons for its ultimate downfall.
Prosecutors claim that Lay and Skilling presided over widespread accounting fraud that cost investors and employees billions of dollars. The defense argues that market panic, not financial abuse, ruined an essentially healthy business.
The goal for lawyers on both sides of the case is to highlight their best evidence to leave the strongest impression with jurors, who will decide whether the defendants are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
After U.S. District Judge Sim Lake reads lengthy technical instructions to the jury this morning, Washington-based prosecutor Kathryn Ruemmler will take about three hours to make the government’s closing argument. A team of defense lawyers will argue all day Tuesday. Prosecutor Sean Berkowitz, director of the Enron task force, will get the final word and a chance to respond to the defense’s arguments Wednesday.
Then the fates of Lay, 64, and Skilling, 52, will rest with the jury.
The Enron prosecution is one of the most sophisticated white- collar investigations ever and the capstone in the Justice Department’s effort to hold executives accountable for financial malfeasance.
At the same time, Skilling and Lay, who earned $370 million in the years before Enron’s demise and whose pictures once were featured on business magazine covers, face the prospect of spending more than a decade in prison if they are convicted.
The defendants need to plant seeds of doubt in the mind of only one person among the eight women and four men on the jury to win a mistrial.
Prosecutors need a unanimous verdict on at least one charge to convict.
Prosecutors must “take a very lengthy set of facts and boil it down,” said Leon Rodriguez, a Washington defense lawyer not involved in the Enron case. “In a complex white-collar case, that’s a really tough burden of proof, and it’s been evidenced by acquittals and hung juries over the years.”
Attorneys for Lay, who faces six fraud and false statements charges, and Skilling, who faces 28 criminal counts, have signaled that the government’s heavy legal burden will be a key element of closing arguments Tuesday.
“This is a case that is a very complex case, and it’s got room in it for reasonable minds to disagree,” Michael Ramsey, Lay’s lead attorney, said outside the courthouse last week in a preview of his closing argument.
But in a trial fraught with negative public perceptions, the defense grapples above all else with the lingering image of displaced workers sitting in front of a gleaming office tower, clutching boxes and belongings as they came to terms with the loss of their jobs and retirement savings when Enron filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2001.
“I’ve got to deal with five years of preconceived notions and whether any of that has changed,” Daniel Petrocelli, the lead attorney for Skilling, said in an interview. “This is not about whether Jeff or Ken did a good job or a bad job. It’s about whether they committed crimes.”
