{"id":2028,"date":"2009-11-12T12:58:28","date_gmt":"2009-11-12T20:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=2028"},"modified":"2009-11-12T13:20:49","modified_gmt":"2009-11-12T21:20:49","slug":"sentence-first-verdict-finally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/sentence-first-verdict-finally\/","title":{"rendered":"Sentence first; verdict finally"},"content":{"rendered":"

But the verdict was not at all what the prosecutors were looking forward to when they tried a pair of Bear Stearns traders in the press<\/a>, using what we now know to have been highly selective leaks.\u00a0 Once the jury saw the leaked material in context<\/a>, in a forum that consisted of more than soundbites and press outrage, they came to their own conclusion:<\/p>\n

In the indictment, the prosecution quoted from a note Mr. Tannin sent in April 2007 from his personal Gmail account to Mr. Cioffi\u2019s wife. The government made much of the fact that Mr. Tannin chose not to send it to Mr. Cioffi himself or from his Bear Stearns\u2019 e-mail account, suggesting he was trying to hide something. \u201cThe subprime market looks pretty damn ugly,\u201d Mr. Tannin wrote, adding that if a recent financial report was correct, \u201cI think we should close the funds now …. The entire subprime market is toast.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

But the jury eventually saw the entire message, in which Mr. Tannin ruminated at length about various courses of action and seemed to be striving to make the soundest financial choice. In other words, it was just what you would hope your fund manager would be worrying about in a precarious time. In the end, he concluded he was feeling \u201cpretty damn good\u201d about what was happening at the funds and that \u201cI\u2019ve done the best possible job that I could have done.\u201d Any wonder the jurors came away with reasonable doubt?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bear Stearns executives are smiling now, but that’s what one does when the authorities threaten to take your life away, and you suddenly get it back.\u00a0 The jury made it clear this case was not close<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“They were scapegoats for Wall Street<\/span>.”<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>\u201cThe entire market crashed,\u201d one juror explained. \u201cYou can\u2019t blame that on two people.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But you can try if you’re a young prosecutor with the press, public, and political bosses cheering you on.\u00a0 And unlike these traders who lost their jobs, their firms, and much of their personal fortunes on their gamble, the prosecutors lost nothing personally on their gamble.\u00a0 Like the traders, though, the prosecutors did lose millions of dollars of other people’s money–ours, the taxpayers.<\/p>\n

And even now, most commenters are assuming that this an unfortunate outcome<\/a>, that the prosecution was merely incompetent rather than opportunistic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But the verdict was not at all what the prosecutors were looking forward to when they tried a pair of Bear Stearns traders in the press, using what we now know to have been highly selective leaks.\u00a0 Once the jury saw the leaked material in context, in a forum that consisted of more than soundbites […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,14],"tags":[55],"class_list":["post-2028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reporting-on-pay","category-scandal","tag-taxes-opm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2028"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2045,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions\/2045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}