A lawyer for Stephen DiCarmine, the former executive director of the once-prominent law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, told a New York jury yesterday not to convict his client based solely on dozens of emails, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. Prosecutors have said that the emails introduced during the three-month trial indicated that DiCarmine had an awareness of accounting shenanigans at the law firm, which collapsed in May 2012. But Austin Campriello, the lawyer for DiCarmine, said that the emails could be misinterpreted and “can be easily misconstrued.” Campriello told the jurors that the emails were untrustworthy without witness testimony to support the incriminating inference that prosecutors wished to draw. In his closing statement on Wednesday, Campriello noted that none of the seven former Dewey employees who pleaded guilty to lesser criminal charges and testified at the three-month trial had directly linked DiCarmine to any improper accounting maneuvers.
