No really? Seriously...? Well...decide for yourself:

Enron trial no Lay-up - With all we know about Enron, convicting Lay and Skilling may seem like a sure win. It's not.

By Roger Parloff, FORTUNE senior writer
January 11, 2006: 12:35 PM EST
FORTUNE

Suppose as an epilogue to "The Emperor's New Clothes," the humiliated potentate had been brought up on charges of public lewdness. Putting aside sovereign-immunity issues, what should the jury's verdict be?
Well, the emperor should obviously be acquitted because he never intended to go naked in public; he really believed he was wearing something, even if he couldn't see exactly what it was.

To commit most crimes, one has to intend to do something wrong. Accordingly, truly deluding oneself -- gullibly trusting a deceitful subordinate (in the emperor's case, the tailor), relying on yes-men advisors, resting undue confidence on one's own innovative brilliance -- is a defense. An individual cannot be a criminal unless he has a certain baseline level of self-knowledge. Without that, psychiatrists may have labels for him, but the penal code does not.

At their criminal trial Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay will each advance defenses closely analogous to the naked emperor's: They were tragically misled, their attorneys will argue, by a small group of deceitful subordinates (chief financial officer Andrew Fastow and his minions); their actions were blessed at every turn by seemingly illustrious advisors (sycophantic accountants at Arthur Andersen, blindered lawyers at Vinson & Elkins and a passive board of directors); and perhaps, too, they got a little carried away by their own presumed innovative brilliance during the irrational exuberance of the late 1990s bubble economy.

In this context, their attorneys may suggest, the defendants believed they had discovered a legitimate business model that relied heavily upon the use of extremely complex, structured finance transactions that, in hindsight, may have proved unsound...

For more trial speculation check out the full piece.

-- MDT

Labels: Andy Fastow, Enron