Jury Gets Scrushy Fraud Case
May 19th, 2005The jury is to begin deliberating today in U.S. District Court in the case of Richard Scrushy, 52, who faces “dozens of years in prison,” according to this report in today’s Birmingham News - if he is convicted of running a $2.64 billion fraud that cheated HealthSouth investors from 1996 through most of 2002.
The closing arguments were a theatrical pause in a trial that rested heavily on financial documents and accounting principles, the News reports. Jurors heard six hours of arguments “that included voice imitations and appeals to patriotism. They saw a visual display of a giant cartoon mouse with a block of cheese on his head.”
This is funny? Hmmm.
Perhaps you will find the Birmingham blogger’s take more interesting?
“After coming to Birmingham, and after fifty-five days in the courtroom, I sometimes feel like I am reliving Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now. Especially after today,” says Philip Smith of the Report from Birmingham blog. “Dim the lights in the courtroom and I could be sitting in the corner with a spider (or perhaps a rat) on my head, saying, ‘The Horror. The Horror.’ In a trial that often saw a lot of everything, and sometimes, a great deal of nothing, the closing arguments proved there’s always a little more after you’re sure you’ve seen it all.”
Or perhaps the New York Times version is more your style?
“Employing a folksy and colorful Southern style that he has used throughout this nearly four-month criminal trial, Jim Parkman, one of the defense lawyers, told the jury in closing arguments that Mr. Scrushy was a victim of a far-ranging conspiracy by his underlings. Mr. Parkman even displayed a poster-size cartoon of a rat with a piece of cheese to attack the credibility of one of the government’s main witnesses, William T. Owens, a former HealthSouth chief financial officer who testified that Mr. Scrushy was behind the fraud,” the Times reports.
A six pack and some cheese anyone?
