"Ken Lay's Ultimate Plea Bargain"

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"The talk around the water cooler in my office this week was not that Ken Lay had paid a terrible price for his crimes but that he had somehow gotten off easy."

Sometimes those NTs just crack me up. The headline is funnier than the article, which is posted here:
http://health.yahoo.com/experts/theprin ... ea-bargain

I think what has most people perturbed in this case is that Ken Lay and his family will probably not be held responsible for his crimes, at least in this life (for those that belive in an afterlife).

Because of his death, the defense team will make a motion for the conviction to be vacated and it will be routinely granted because the law holds that a person is innocent until guilty in the US and that includes the ability to ccomplete the appeals process (which a dead man cannot do). That means that Ken Lay's criminal records will be clean and the government will not be able to collect any fines (and will have to return assests siezed to insure that the fines were paid to the estate).

It is true that the shareholders can go after the estate but without a conviction, it will be much harder and it is possible that the estate is in irrevocable trusts which means that the property was not his and as such, cannot be touched. The life insurance policies and annuities also cannot be touched. I am sure that the Lay family will come out of this just fine.

I think the final irony was that he died while on vacation in Aspen CO, not in the gutter and I think that was a slap in the face of all the people who lost millions.

That is why people think he found a way to get out of his punishment (besides, had it been you or I that was convicted of a crime, we would have been in jail regardless of whether we appealed the conviction or not).

Incidentally, my aunt and cousin-in-law worked for Enron. And I almost got a job there.

Tim

I had been wondering if maybe they snuffed him to shut him up.