Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay have been convicted (Skilling on 19 of 26 charges--or was it 28?, and Lay on 6 of 6--plus a separate conviction in a bench trial for personal bank fraud) in the collapse of Enron! Hooray! Toss the confetti, toot the tooters, bang the drums! The jury system works.
I never could take seriously Skilling's and Lay's contentions that even though they held positions of great power and authority in Enron, they were clueless about what was going on.
Get real! Anyone could see from their demeanor that they both were "I'm in control" kind of jerks. They knew exactly what they were doing, and did it anyway, because they were arrogant enough to think they could get away with it.
But what really ticked me off was the behavior of their attorneys, both inside and outside the trial. One of Skilling's attorneys made the ludicrous claim that since no one could point to a meeting where a conspiracy was created that no conspiracy therefore took place. I know it was closing ARGUMENTS, but misstating what the law requires to get a conviction on conspiracy is not an argument--it's stupid.
I salute the jury for seeing through it. Justice is not always done in this country, but it's done often enough in the big cases to keep my faith in the system mostly intact. Now if we could only get justice done in the small cases as well as the large . . . we'd be onto something!
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