Former Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling tried once again Wednesday to delay their trial, which is set to begin on Monday. The two men’s legal teams requested that the pending trial be delayed until the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considers a request to move the trial out of Houston.

Two days ago, U.S. District Judge Sim Lake ruled that the trial would be held in Houston, despite objections from the defense. Lay and Skilling argued that the jury pool is too prejudiced to hear the case, but Lake said enough safeguards existed to ensure a fair trial.

“The District Court indisputably abused its discretion,” wrote Mike Ramsey, who heads Lay’s defense team, and Daniel Petrocelli, one of Skilling’s attorneys, in a brief to the appellate court. “Other than the venue transfer in the Oklahoma City bombing case, there has perhaps not been a single criminal case in America in the last half century that so cried out for a change of venue.” Lake applied the wrong legal test to keep the trial in Houston, they wrote, and he misread the evidence about adverse local publicity. Lake, they noted, also did not conduct a hearing concerning community bias, which has been a defense concern.

About 400 people were originally called to jury duty, with at least 150 dropped for hardship or bias. An estimated 100 remain in the jury pool.

In related news, the Enron Task Force on Wednesday requested a modification to a rule requiring federal prosecutors to notify all affected crime victims at the beginning of a trial. Because affected crime victims are estimated to be in the tens of thousands — including Enron’s former shareholders — prosecutors instead are requesting that they be allowed to notify the media.

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