Lorie DeBehnke The New & Improved Partisan Brawl EXCERPT: The defense put Wall Street’s practices on trial, and the defense won. The jury in Sacramento eventually acquitted all the defendants of all charges. When I got Bill Black on the phone last week, he talked about the case as a watershed moment. “I came out there to say, ‘Look! there are lions roaming the campsite!’ They took down the global economy!,” he told me. “And jurors can understand this. You say that you can’t get a prosecution. We will come to your back yard and show you how to get a prosecution. Because we’ll do it as a defense. Even though we have no FBI agents, no subpoena authority. . . , we’ll put on a successful prosecution. And we’ll show to you that jurors can understand this.” Of course, the result in the Sacramento case might knock those beautiful plans off the track. Up till now it has been covered as a kind of man-bites-dog story, because “an acquittal in Sacramento federal court is rare,” as the Bee put it. But maybe, in the weeks to come, acquittals like this will become more common. Already, says John Balazs, a member of the defense team, he has been contacted by other attorneys arguing similar cases. Maybe lawyers all over the country will soon be reminding juries that a borrower’s alleged misstatements can’t have been “material” to a lender if the lender was a control fraud dealing in liar’s loans. Maybe one day the courts of this land will acknowledge what the public has known for years: That the fraud that wrecked the world actually happened in the offices of the shadow banks and the Wall Street investment firms.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 03:22:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015