Jurors began deliberating yesterday after prosecutors closed the government's fraud and conspiracy case against Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, Enron's former chief executives.
They urged jurors to return a verdict signalling: "You can't buy justice. You have to earn it."
Sean Berkowitz, a government prosecutor, underlined for jurors that the defendants had paid tens of millions of dollars to hire top lawyers to defend themselves against charges that they lied about Enron's deteriorating financial position or omitted critical facts at key times to support the stock price.
Mr Berkowitz pulled out a poster board divided into black and white parts. The black side said "lies" and the white side said "truth". The four-month case boiled down to a simple decision over who had told the truth and who had lied, he said.
Mr Lay and Mr Skilling are charged with lying to investors to hide the true state of the company in the months before it collapsed in December 2001, in what was then the US's biggest bankruptcy. The two men deny any wrongdoing.
Mr Berkowitz rejected the defence's warnings that any hesitation in reaching a decision over who told the truth meant jurors had to acquit the defendants. He urged jurors to go through the multitude of documents, and video and audio tapes.
"We expect you to hesitate," he said. Without any "smoking gun" document tying the defendants to the crimes, it was the word of Mr Lay and Mr Skilling against that of former Enron employees who had agreed to testify.
During the trial, defence lawyers accused the government of bullying those witnesses into testifying, despite their innocence. And they mocked prosecutors for calling them to the stand, instead of regulators, or other "untainted" parties.
"These people picked them to work for them," Mr Berkowitz said, referring to Mr Lay and Mr Skilling. "We didn't go out to central casting and find these people." He insisted that prosecutors had followed a trail of evidence in the more than four years since Enron went bankrupt, and it led to Mr Lay and Mr Skilling.
