The automated signature machine did it.
YEAH!!!
That's the ticket!
Enron founder Kenneth Lay leaves the federal courthouse in Houston, Thursday, May 18, 2006, at the end of the day. As 12 jurors began their first full day of deliberations in a fraud and conspiracy case against him, Lay was in court at a new trial in a separate case where he's accused of fraud stemming from his personal banking. (AP Photo/Ric Feld)
Anyone that would allow there signature to be done aside from their own hand deserves anything that happens as a result.
Pure Foolishness imho.
Well, this is a criminal proceeding, so the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt". If all the signatures in question are completely uniform and identical to those produced by the device, and Lay can demonstrate that subordinates had access to the device, he might get off (and rightly so under our system of laws, which prefers the abhomination of exhonorating the guilty to the abhomination of punishing the innocent because doing so restrains the threat to liberty posed by state power).
On the other hand, in the civil suits, where "preponderance of the evidence" is the standard, this won't help, and such ill-gotten gains as he still has should be taken from him and distributed to the victims of Enron's collective fraud.
When U.S. District Judge Sim Lake, who is hearing the case without a jury...
Have I gone stupid again???
Thanks for posting this. I looked for your Enron trial post last night and didn't find it, so I was going to hunt one down and do it myself when I got through with my chores, because of the hilarious auto-pen defense.
This was simply too good to miss. Note that his former personal secretary was a witness for the prosecution - dontcha know he tried to blame it all on her at first? And then there's the banker and the financial manager who just accepted that it was his usual signature.
Yeah, yeah, at night when the Andersen people were up there shredding docs, the secretary would join them and run that signature machine, just for grins.
Lay was his giggling self after court yesterday - said it was a "grand day" and he was happy as a lark. Meanwhile, former employees and investors are eating cat food to get by.