Interesting Q&A with Mike Ramsey, one of Kenny Boy Lay's defense attorneys. You think he knows who his audience is here?
Q: Did you choose criminal defense work right out of law school?A: People ask how some left-wing crazy like me from some place like Nacogdoches, where I really started, got to this. And I've often answered that I read my Constitution in the light of a burning cross.
I think that if you read constitutional history you understand that we, America, right now are far and away the great power of the earth. And if there is a danger to the Republic, it comes from concentration of power in the hands of a few in Washington, not from an outside force of any sort. We're impervious to that.
No one will topple America from the outside. But we may very well lose liberties internally. And if people are not willing to stand up and challenge the government, then the government continues to assume more and more power over us as individuals.
Until you see how vicious it becomes out on the point of a stick where it pierces flesh, you don't understand how powerful the government really is and needs to be held in check.
And if there is any redeeming social value to the defense practice, it is that we are the people to whom it is given the high duty, I believe, to stand up and tell the government to go to hell when they need to be told that.
And this is such a case.
Q: Do you see the Enron Task Force as part of this potential growing evil?
A: Yes. I think that the constitution of any special group of prosecutors who pick their target before they do their investigation is dangerous and an aberration that shouldn't be tolerated.
Meanwhile, Tom Kirkendall has some good stuff on the ongoing PR war between Team Lay and Team Fed, and the implications of the Causey-Fastow memo, which has certainly tightened the noose around the neck of former Enron chief accountant Rick Causey, but which might prove to be a key piece of exculpatory evidence for Lay and Jeff Skilling. Check it out.
Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 25, 2004 to Enronarama | TrackBackI don't seem to remember Mr. Lay turning down his compensation when the company was supposedly kicking butt because he didn't know what was going on. Throw the lying corporate pig on the spit and let him turn until he's well done.