Protecting Investors or Prosecuting Innocents? The Dangers of Vagueness in Financial Fraud Laws

Third installment in a five-part series on Silverglate’s book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.

“As a result of a burgeoning number of fraud investigations and prosecutions, I have become convinced that a concerted interagency effort is needed. We want to bring this additional firepower to bear on behalf of investors who might otherwise lose their confidence in the integrity of these markets.”

The Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, an interagency effort to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the current economic crisis, was established via executive order on November 17. But the above announcement was made twenty years prior. On January 31, 1989, then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh touted the creation of a coordinated task force to bring to heel those responsible for the Wall Street scandals du jour.

Indeed, the present response to Wall Street failures seems straight out of a time-tested Washington playbook: Ratchet up enforcement, throw the miscreants in prison, and—voila—the public’s confidence in their markets and in their government is restored.

Arrest rates for “white collar” fraud have surged in the wake of recent well-publicized financial scandals, according to data generated (PDF) from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Over a two-year period after the savings-and-loan scandal and the creation of the task force described above (1990-1992), the number of fraud arrests increased 53%; over the same period following the dot-com bust (2000-2002), arrests jumped 26%. Now, with regulatory agencies expanding their probes of alleged insider-trading violations and the Justice Department promising more convictions, a raft of indictments appears inevitable. But do these enforcement efforts reflect true criminal violations? Putting aside the long-term efficacy of such periodic orgies of prosecution, there remains the nagging question of whether the defendants are guilty of any crime.

One’s unease lies not in the seeming futility of enforcement per se, but in the very nature of the laws that regulate financial fraud. For one thing, the sheer volume of regulatory codes makes adherence to legal standards a high hurdle. When Congress was considering the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act earlier this year, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Federalist Society—organizations on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum but joined at the hip in battling unfair and excessive federal prosecutions—authored a joint letter (PDF) to the Senate Judiciary Committee, pointing out that virtually all criminal provisions then under consideration were already encompassed within the existing federal criminal code. Congress ignored this nonpartisan and eminently sensible plea, passed the legislation, and added to the Justice Department’s armamentarium of overlapping and vague criminal statutes.

More pernicious than the volume of federal laws, however, is their imprecise wording. Prosecutors are given too much latitude in pursuing perceived wrongdoers whose conduct isn’t explicitly proscribed by statutory language. In a society of laws, fair notice as to what conduct might land a citizen in prison is a vital component of due process.

This should not be confused with a plea for de-regulation, which is largely a political and not a legal debate. Nor is it a plea for leniency for those who knowingly violate clear rules, even if those rules are unwise. But providing average citizens with clarity of their legal obligations is a vital civil liberties matter having nothing to do with whether one believes in more regulation or less. Timothy Lynch, director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, spells out the need for specifically defined legal boundaries in his timely treatise on modern criminal law, In the Name of Justice (to which I contributed a chapter):

There is precious little difference between a secret law and a published regulation that cannot be understood. History is filled with examples of oppressive governments that persecuted unpopular groups and innocent individuals by keeping the law’s requirements from the people.

Galleon Group hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, indicted (PDF) yesterday on 11 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, would likely fit into this “unpopular” category, especially as his unflattering, hand-cuffed image from an October 16 early-morning “perp walk” continues to grace broadsheets and blogs. Rajaratnam is accused of having foraged around for—and obtained—purportedly non-public information from corporate insiders. But serious questions exist as to the line between legitimate research and illegal trading, as well as the extent to which insider trading laws even cover such outsiders who seek inside information. (Unlike Rajaratnam, others involved in the case might be insiders, and their legal obligations would be considerably clearer.)

The law criminalizing insider trading, enacted with the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, prohibits “any person, directly or indirectly,” to “use or employ, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security…any manipulative or deceptive device.” Lawmakers assumed the SEC, which the Act created, would issue regulations to flesh out the vague language and effectuate the statute’s intent. But the SEC’s regulations tend to mimic, rather than clarify, the statute’s oracular wording, and neither the SEC nor Congress has been particularly eager to spell out precisely the nature of “securities fraud” or “insider trading.”

In the 1980s, both Congress and the SEC had an opportunity to provide clarity to securities fraud law. The Insider Trading Sanctions Act of 1984 (“ITSA”) substantially increased the penalties for insider trading. The Insider Trading and Securities Fraud Enforcement Act of 1988 (“ITSFEA”) further upped the ante by providing sanctions against those who “recklessly…failed to take appropriate steps to prevent” violations by others. Remarkably, despite near-unanimous support in both chambers of Congress, neither statute did anything to define precisely what insider trading was and what kinds of “outsiders” were covered.

During the ITSFEA hearings, Chairman John Dingell of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce claimed that any definition of insider trading would provide criminals with a “roadmap for fraud.” (It appeared not to occur to him that legal clarity is actually meant to provide a roadmap for lawful conduct.) Dingell explained that his committee “did not believe that the lack of consensus over the proper delineation of an insider trading definition should impede progress on the needed enforcement reforms encompassed within this legislation.”

It is reasonable to ask the question—especially in light of the early morning arrests, perp walks, sensational trials, and gargantuan prison sentences—whether the current system for dealing with “insider trading” by corporate outsiders who pursue as much information as their research skills and personal contacts allow comports with basic notions of due process of law.

Similar due process questions arose in the case of two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers. Prosecutors indicted (PDF) Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin on securities fraud charges for, in effect, presenting an optimistic picture to investors while aware of the possibility of collapse. When Cioffi and Tannin were faced with questions as the subprime mortgage market—in which their funds were heavily invested—looked ominously shaky, they doubtless agreed with the prevailing wisdom: Sure, a total collapse could happen, but the markets could instead stabilize and suddenly present managers with a huge buying opportunity. The situation, after all, was unprecedented in modern times.

Were a fund manager to respond to questions by publicly indulging his pessimistic side— “I think our liquidity has dried up and we may be on the verge of collapse”—he surely would have caused precisely that which he was hoping to avoid: a fatal “run on the bank.” Such a statement could rightly be seen as professional malpractice, subjecting the manager to endless civil litigation by disgruntled investors who doubtless could demonstrate that, at the time, an optimistic outcome was still a distinct possibility and that the manager’s predictions of doom were a reckless self-fulfilling prophecy.

The case was yet another example of the Justice Department targeting “professionals who have engaged in seemingly routine requirements of their job,” I wrote in the Wall Street Journal when the criminal investigation commenced in April 2008. Fortunately, jurors recognized the Catch-22 in which the Bear managers found themselves and acquitted Cioffi and Tannin on November 10.

In light of the legacy of the federal government responding to market downturns with task forces and ramped up prosecutions and perp walks, former Attorney General Thornburgh’s testimony (PDF) at a July 2009 Congressional hearing on the phenomenon of “overcriminalization” was a gratifying departure from remarks past. Said Thornburgh:

Make no mistake, when individuals commit crimes they should be held responsible and punished accordingly. The line has become blurred, however, on what conduct constitutes a crime, particularly in corporate criminal cases, and this line needs to be redrawn and reclarified.

Amen!

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes