As promised, here's what Larry Thompson, Deputy Attorney General, or "CEO of the Justice Department" as he referred to himself, said today at the ABA Criminal Justice Section Council Luncheon where he was the keynote speaker.

He addressed two topics: the detention of enemy combatants and corporate fraud. As to the first, it was pretty standard with some familiar buzz lines:

"The Constitution is not a suicide pact" and

"We will think outside the box. We will not think outside the Constitution."

His message was short: Enemy combatants who take up arms against America, including those who are U.S. citizens, are not entitled to enter the criminal justice and court systems. He analogized them to the famous WWII case of a few Germans captured here who were treated as enemy combatants. He said, "Their execution served a necessary purpose" in fighting WWII.

It should be noted that the Justice Department position is directly opposite that of the ABA. ABA President Robert Hirshon commissioned the ABA Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants. The task force, chaired by Miami lawyer Neal Sonnett, included military law experts, prosecutors, judges and defense counsel. Here is the report, jsut released yesterday.

In a nutshell, the report calls for detained citizens to have the right to counsel and judicial review of their cases. The report did not address the rights of foreign nationals who are detained as combatants.

In his remarks yesterday, ABA President Hirshon said, "We accept the importance of intelligence gathering, we need it, but that doesn't mean you suspend the Constitution."

Back to Larry Thompson, who moved on to discussing corporate fraud. Thompson, who has extensive prosecutorial and defense experience in corporate fraud cases and is widely considered to be fair, smart and dedicated, an opinion shared by TalkLeft, has been named by President Bush to head up the new Corporate Fraud task force.

The fraud task force is an inter-agency task force that includes the DOJ, Treasury Dept., SEC, and other agencies. The task force will marshal law-enforcement resources.

Thompson said this means that we will be seeing a lot of indictments of the corporations themselves--charged as entities rather than indictments of just the employees. It won't be automatice that an employee's wrongdoing will lead to the indictment of the corporation, but it will be evaluated in every case.

Justice will use a seven factor analysis to determine whether to charge the coporations. We couldn't write as fast as he rattled them off, so here's those we did get: the corporation's history of wrongdoing; its response to learning of wrongdoing within the corporation, meaning what controls did they set in place to ensure it didn't happen again; the level within the corporation at which the fraud existed (how high up it was); and the pervasiveness of the behavior.

Only by prosecuting the corporations themselves, Thompson said, can there be systemic reform. This is because civil sanctions don't work and are not an effective deterrent. Corporations consider the loss of money to be a routine cost of doing business.

He urged lawyers to remember that when they represent a corporation, their client is not the managment team or individuals who retained them but the corporation itself, which means the shareholders and investors.

He was warmly received, particularly by defense lawyers in the group who have known and worked with him when he was in private practice. For the record, yes we know that some have alleged he has a conflict in leading the corporate task force because the law firm he practiced with and of which he was a partner represented some of the corporations who might be looked at. We are confident that Thompson knows what a conflict is and would have been the first to decline the position if he had an actual conflict.

After Thompson's speech we went over to the exhibition hall to see what the legal service providers were offering and what freebies they were giving away. As usual, the best of the bunch was Lexis-Nexis and Martindale Hubbell. In addition to the goodies they gave away, they had installed ten or more computers in the center of the room so the lawyers could check their email and surf the internet. They also provided the buses that ran all day long shuttling lawyers between the various hotels hosting different section meetings.