If you want to understand what’s going on in the courtroom in Houston, The Houston Chronicle has gone to heroic lengths with both a legal commentary blog and a blow-by-blow trial blog. The legal blog in particular is filled with fascinating detail and some great writing.

Kent Shaffer on whether people plead guilty to things they didn’t do:

The bottom line is that people really do plead guilty to things that they did not do; it happens all of the time. Their decisions can be motivated by money, by a desire to limit their exposure, or simply due to a lack of courage and if the cost of a lenient sentence is doing a few pet tricks for the government then it is simply the cost of doing business. Get ready to see grown men in Oxford suits and wingtip shoes rolling over, playing dead, and barking while on their hind legs; trying to earn a few extra biscuits.

And Samuel Buell, who was lead prosecutor on the Enron case until March 2004, explains what proving intent to defraud will require:

So look for this trial, and later judicial review of the case if it gets that far, potentially to turn on small pieces of evidence that might tell a great deal about the extent to which the defendants were thinking at the time of their conduct that they were engaged in something wrongful. Often, this telling kind of evidence takes the form of efforts to conceal some important fact about a defendant’s conduct from others, in a way that indicates the defendant feared reprisal or rebuke for what he or she was doing. This kind of evidence is what white-collar practitioners often refer to as “badges of fraud.” This might be more than a lawyer’s concept. Juries often focus on this kind of thing too, because it seems to connect to basic intuitions about how to distinguish fraud from routine business practice.

Compelling, wonderful stuff, that provides insight I wasn’t getting from most press coverage of the case.