Richard Scrushy was the CEO of the Birmingham company HealthSouth, which was involved in corporate fraud worth an estimated $2.7 billion dollars. In his 2005 trial, Scrushy employed the once popular "just because I'm in charge doesn't mean I know what's going on" defense that recently failed Ken Lay. Despite the fact that five Healthsouth Chief Financial Officers told the court that Scrushy was involved in the fraud, a Birmingham jury acquitted him in a verdict that stunned legal analysts and prosecutors. The reason Scrushy got off was an imaginative and astoundingly cynical strategy designed to bias the overwhelmingly African-American and religious jury pool in Birmingham.

As soon as he was indicted, Scrushy left his suburban church and joined a mostly black congregation in a lower-middle class neighborhood. He got himself ordained as a minister (I'm not making this up) and produced a Jim and Tammy Fay Baker-style morning prayer show on local TV featuring Scrushy and his wife, with local black ministers as frequent guests and the unfair persecution of such a God-fearing man the most popular topic. He had a prayer group praying for him every day at the trial. And he launched these websites, which were there solely to paint Scrushy as a decent, honest man of God and the case against him as a Job-like test of his faith.

It worked. There is nothing illegal about using the web in this way; Martha Stuart and Lay also had PR websites during their trials, though there is much in the tactic that raises ethical alarms and threats to the justice system. For example, Scrushy's website argued for his innocence in the first person, but he availed himself of his Constitutional right not to testify in his trial. Essentially the site gave him the opportunity to make assertions that couldn't be challenged under cross-examination. At least Ken Lay was willing to take the stand.

Why are the Scrushy websites relevant now? Because the Godly man was just convicted of bribery, conspiracy and four counts of mail fraud along with the Alabama Governor he bribed with a half-million dollar campaign contribution. The jury pool in Montgomery was not quite as easily gulled as in Birmingham, though Scrushy's outrageous strategy was the same. Scrushy hired Fred Gray, who once had been an attorney for Martin Luther King, to defend him, and like Scrushy, Gray's shamelessness knew no bounds. ``You can make Dr. King's dream come true by returning a not guilty verdict for Richard Scrushy,'' he told the federal jury in closing arguments. If they found Scrushy not guilty, Gray told them, ``you'll be able to join in that old song: `Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last.'''

Maybe this turned the tide against the multi-millionaire's cynical religion and race-based defense by turning the jury members' stomachs. There's always a chance the verdict will be over-turned on appeal, but the websites can't help Scrushy now. News reports said that Mrs. Scrushy (or "Tammy Fay II") was stunned at the guilty verdict, saying, "I don't understand it."

Abraham Lincoln could have explained it to her. Even with unethical websites, you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

See unethical sites from other months