How much did that brief cost per page?

Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron Corp. CEO who’s been in federal prison for nine months serving a 24-year sentence, filed an appeal today with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Skilling, who was convicted in May 2006 of 19 criminal charges stemming from the collapse of Enron in 2001, asks the appeals court to reverse his conviction or remand it to the trial judge with instructions to dismiss the case or retry it in a different venue “under lawful procedures with a properly instructed jury.” Alternatively, Skilling asks the court to vacate his sentence and remand the case for resentencing “in accordance with the law.” U.S. District Judge Sim Lake of Houston presided over the trial in which Skilling was convicted along with former Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth Lay. Lay died in July 2006 before sentencing. Skilling’s brief is 239 pages long, so I haven’t been able to read it all yet. But Skilling alleges four distinct categories of legal error: 1. the Enron Task Force’s case against Skilling was based on an “untenable theory of ‘honest services’ fraud”; 2. the Enron Task Force obtained erroneous jury instructions that misguided jurors; 3. the judge erred by failing to move the trial to a venue other than Houston and by not allowing a long enough voir dire to “weed through the rampant animus in the jury pool”; and 4. the Enron Task Force engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by acts such as systematically suppressing evidence and securing unlawful plea agreements. Skilling also argues that his sentence is too long: four times longer than other Enron executives, two to three times longer than similarly situated white-collar defendants, and six years longer than the average federal sentence for murder. “In sum, the government’s zeal to bring a criminal case against Jeff Skilling, and prosecute and try him in Houston, Texas, required a process and produced a result that was flawed throughout, from the erroneous theory underlying the indictment through to his severely harsh sentence. That final error ultimately satisfied what many were demanding long before anyone knew what happened at Enron: no matter what the facts and whatever the law, someone would have to pay for Enron’s failure,” Skilling alleges in the brief. The brief was filed by Skilling’s lead trial lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli, a partner in O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, others from O’Melveny in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and Ronald Woods, a solo practitioner in Houston. They seek oral argument.  A jury found Skilling guilty of one count of conspiracy, 12 counts of securities fraud, five counts of false statements to auditors and one count of insider trading. 
-- Brenda Sapino Jeffreys