The Failure of the Corporate Fraud Task Force

An article in The American Lawyer digs into the numbers behind the decline of corporate indictments and finds that the CFTF was mostly PR.

...we found several high-profile acquittals, hung juries and appellate reversals -- and some of those prosecution failures were due specifically to questionable tactics by the Justice Department. In all, 27 of the defendants whose cases we examined, including executives from Adelphia, America Online Inc., PurchasePro.com Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc., were acquitted at trial. Another 28 cases were dismissed. There were 22 mistrials. And nine convictions were overturned on appeal, including those of such high-profile defendants as Credit Suisse First Boston Corp. banker Frank Quattrone and the Enron "Nigerian Barge" defendants from Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.

...And while many of the lawyers we interviewed say that the task force's directives did result in more corporations cooperating with the government, defense lawyers and even some federal judges came to believe that that cooperation was won at a high cost: the erosion of such basic defendant's rights as the attorney-client privilege and the right to counsel.

The decline in corporate prosecutions should be celebrated. It seems as if the bureaucrats have move onto other ways to justify their existence.