Posted on 05/31/2005 8:15:34 AM PDT by Asphalt
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned the conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm for destroying Enron Corp.-related documents before the energy giant's collapse. In a unanimous opinion, justices said the former Big Five accounting firm's June 2002 obstruction-of-justice conviction _ which virtually destroyed Andersen _ was improper. The decision said jury instructions at trial were too vague and broad for jurors to determine correctly whether Andersen obstructed justice. "The jury instructions here were flawed in important respects," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the court. The ruling is a setback for the Bush administration, which made prosecution of white-collar criminals a high priority following accounting scandals at major corporations. After Enron's 2001 collapse, the Justice Department went after Andersen first. Enron crashed in December 2001, putting more than 5,000 employees out of work, just six weeks after the energy company revealed massive losses and writedowns...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Well, you know, when a decision from the Supremes is unanimous, I take a hard look, no matter what my first instinct is.
yeah, it's hard to disagree with Rehnquist (sp?) Scallia (sp?) and Thomas all on the same side with O'Conner and them.
Lot of good it will do them now.
Whups, sorry about driving you out of business.
Day late and a (billion) dollar short.......
Well, anyone who has ever worked with people from Andersen knows that they were the most pompous asses in corporate America. Goldman bankers and traders might have been pompous jerks, but they earned it. Andersen people just decided to walk around like they were better than everyone else for no particular reason. They just nominated themselves as pompous asses. I am glad that they went out of business just on general principle and schadenfreude.
Money talks - an expensive lawyer is usually worth it. AA was guilty as he!!, no question in my mind. AA got what they deserved and served as a wake up to an industry that badly needed one.
The ruling was not that AA was innocent. The ruling says the conviction was improper.
I would prefer to let the market take them out of business than have the state use coercion to do it.
But based on my experience with AA, I agree with you about the prevailing attitude there.
As an investor who lost some significant $ in Worldcom (I know: stupid me), believing the annual and quarterly reports coming out of that company and auditor AA, I've got only a little bit of residual empathy for Arthur Andersen. It's a shame that a few audit groups allowed these scandals to metastasize to the extent that they did, but the fact that AA was involved in so many of these, you have to wonder what was wrong with the culture there.
Interesting decision, considering that this firm among others reaped a fortune in the wealth-transfer from older Americans to young Marxists during the CLINTON-GORE era Dot-Com bubble...
Kind of moot at this point.........
Another ping.
Amazing what money can buy...the point is to void any civil suits pending against the crooks who destroyed the company.
ping
Justice delayed.
Where does A.A. go now for compensation? S.O.L., I guess?
This represents a very good example of why media-generated demands for immediate "justice" usually is reason enough to temporarily delay things until cooler heads and minds can look at an issue dispassionately.
>>The decision said jury instructions at trial were too vague and broad for jurors to determine correctly whether Andersen obstructed justice.<<
Now we need to look at all the jury instructions this judge has given in previous 'obstruction of justice' cases. Maybe we can get a few people out of prison or at least make them rich.
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