The U.S. government’s showcase conviction of accounting giant Arthur Andersen was in jeopardy yesterday after several Supreme Court justices indicated that they thought prosecutors had stretched the law in punishing the firm for destroying documents related to the Enron Corp.
The federal government had a hard time three years ago obtaining a conviction of Arthur Andersen for having shredded its Enron documents as the energy company, its major client, was imploding. A jury in Houston took 10 days and declared itself deadlocked before convicting the accounting firm of a single criminal count of witness tampering. […]