Enron Defendants Face An Angry Houston

Cohen: Most Famous Corporate Fraud Trial In America Opens

(CBS) 
Such awareness, alone, isn't enough to disqualify a potential juror. The law does not require or expect jurors to be completely free from the preconceived notions that each of us carries around like baggage in our daily lives. Indeed, the men and women who ultimately sit as fact-finders in United States v. Jeffrey K. Skilling, et. al surely will come to the jury box at the Robert Casey Federal Courthouse in downtown Houston knowing a great deal about Enron and the two men who ran it so poorly. The test for these jurors, however, and, really, for all of the moving parts of the entire justice system in this case, is whether average Houstonians are willing and able to set aside their negative opinions about the defendants and the company long enough to take in the evidence fairly and to give Lay and Skilling the benefit of every reasonable doubt.

That's a lot to ask of someone who lives directly in the grisly wake of Enron's spectacular fall. In fact, it's a lot more than what most jurors are asked to do in serious criminal cases every day in America; cases which haven't either directly or indirectly affected their own lives. Even though Lay and Skilling aren't accused of bloody murder, it is not hard to see how jurors might feel tremendous community pressure from their friends and neighbors to vote to convict. You need only look at the online coverage of the trial by the Houston Chronicle, compared with web coverage of the trial by other media outlets, to realize that this trial for Houston is the culmination of more than four years of waiting for "justice" in the post-Enron world.

So far, Judge Lake isn't buying that argument, even though many completed juror questionnaires were rife with astonishingly negative comments about the defendants. He has consistently refused to move the trial out of Houston — the issue even now is on appeal to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — in part because he believes that Lay and Skilling are as well-known, and as well-reviled, anywhere and everywhere else in the country as they are in Houston. He's also noted that the costs of moving the trial now would be prohibitive and that he can ensure fairness to the defendants while giving prosecutors their chance to make their case against the defendants where the alleged crimes were committed.

We'll see. The judge smartly left an out for himself and the defendants in case things don't turn out the way he hopes Monday. "Since jury selection is not completed," the judge ruled last week, the "defendants are in no position to credibly argue that the jury that will hear the case will not be fair and unbiased." That leaves open the possibility — quite real, if you ask me — that once jury selection gets going Monday the defendants will be able to credibly make that argument. So the most important corporate trial of our time will start out with no small amount of uncertainty over whether the place that saw Enron's greatest moments and bleakest days can host a fair and just trial for the two men who helped raise it up and then lay it low.