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have you ever seen the reasons people give as to why they are voted for something/someone by reporter?


The interviews I read implied to me that the jurors thought he probably did do it, but that they wanted the prosecutors to give them that little bit of extra reasoning to get beyond "a reasonable doubt". It's the prosecutor's job to help the jury with this when there isn't much to go on in the way of hard evidence, and the prosecutor failed to do it.

The iffy one if Ebbers @ Worldcom. The jurors seemed to conclude that Ebbers knew of the fraud because it was pretty obvious from looking at a number of documents copied to the CEO that something was wrong. That's very iffy. I know someone who was CEO of a large company of 30,000+ employees, and the amount of email and documentation he received was staggering: nobody could possibly read even 1% of it. No way should the Ebbers jury have assumed he saw something because it was sent to him. However Ebbers got what he deserved anyway – he created the stock-price-at-all-costs atmosphere.

Enron will be interesting because things are so turned around. They've essentially let off the guy that most deserved to hang (Fastow) and the guy who deserves to swing from the next tree branch (Skilling) to go after a guy who may in fact not have known about the fraud (Lay). Unless the government can show that Fastow and Skilling told Lay about the problems a jury just might side with Lay that the government witness (Fastow and Skilling) were in a position to hide things from Lay and had motive to do so (they were withholding a lot from the Board after all). Lay is in trouble for trying to get people not to dump stock at the end, but the fraud leading up to that is a trickier question.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock