A flurry of activity concerning the standards for corporate prosecutions, summarized nicely in a Wall Street Journal editorial today, "White-Collar Justice":
Congratulations to Lewis D. Kaplan, the federal judge whose withering critique of prosecutorial abuse in the KPMG tax-shelter case was vindicated yesterday by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.In fact, you can double that applause, because yesterday the Justice Department went further and once again rewrote its white-collar prosecution guidelines to accommodate Judge Kaplan's demolition. Whether Justice anticipated its legal defeat before the surrender is less important than the fact that it has now restored a measure of due process fairness to corporate defendants and their employees.
The Journal regards the new standards as the repudiation of the "Thompson Memo," a government overreaction to the Enron scandals that gave prosecutors in white-collar cases far too much power, inviting abuses.
- The KPMG case is U.S. v. Stein (07-3042-cr) and the court's opinion is available here.
- The Washington Legal Foundation has materials and its amicus brief in the case available here.
- From the Justice Department comes a news release, "Justice Department Revises Charging Guidelines for Prosecuting Corporate Fraud"
- A statement from Deputy Attorney General Mark R. Filip.
- The new Corporate Charging Guidelines
Earlier Point of Law posts here, here here, and especially here, "Want leniency for your business? Knife your workers."