Senator Arlen Specter weighs in on righting some of the wrongs in the prosecution of corporate crime. There may be some reason for optimism.
According to the New York Sun, the legislation introduced yesterday by Senator Specter:
[…] would nullify portions of corporate crime guidelines issued to federal prosecutors in 2003 as part of the response to business frauds, such as the collapse of Enron. The directive, authored by the deputy attorney general at the time, Larry Thompson, has come under fire from many quarters as an erosion of attorney-client privilege.
[..] would also bar the Justice Department from making prosecutorial decisions based on a company’s provision of legal fees or legal counsel to its employees. In March, a federal judge in Manhattan, Lewis Kaplan, ruled that prosecutors violated the constitutional rights of defendants in a tax shelter case by pressuring the accounting firm where they worked, KPMG, not to pay for their legal defense. The government’s appeal of that ruling is pending before the 2nd Circuit.
However, since Senator Specter is the outgoing chairman of the Judiciary Committee, it is not clear that this legislation will ever see the light of day.
And the NFL owners are probably happy about that…