Legal News

2nd Circuit Upholds Judge Kaplan?s Dismissal of KPMG Indictments

By Dan Slater

The summer of vindication rolls on. A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s dismissal of the indictments of 13 former KPMG executives. Judge Kaplan had ruled that the prosecutors’ pressuring of the company not to pay the defendants’ legal fees amounted to a violation of their Sixth Amendment right to counsel and their right to due process.

Here’s the opinion, here’s the story from the WSJ’s Amir Efrati and here’s a Law Blog timeline of the case’s confounding history.

Conveniently, the decision comes on the same day that the Justice Department issued new internal guidelines to restrict prosecutor leverage in white collar crime cases, affirming a proposal it previewed last month. Here’s the story from the WSJ’s Evan Perez.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 28, 2008 (boomark / email).