Sim Lake

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Sim Lake is an American judge and attorney who has served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas since 1988. He notably presided over the the trial of Enron Chairman Ken Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling.

He was born on July 4, 1944 in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 and was number one in his class at the University of Texas School of Law in 1969 [1]. He served in U.S. Army from 1970 to 1971 as a Judge Advocate General's Corps prosecutor in Vietnam, then worked at the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski LLP in Houston, Texas through most of 1972 to the late 1980's. He was appointed as a judge on the U.S. District Court's Southern District of Texas in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan.

Prior to Enron, in other notable cases:

In 2004, Lake ordered the Bible removed from a display on the grounds of the Harris County Civil Courthouse.
In 1999, he ordered the Houston Independent School District to pay private school tuition for a disabled student it could not accommodate.
In 1997, Lake directed an acquittal and mistrial of Stanislaw Burzynski on three dozen counts of fraud after a jury deadlocked on the fate of the cancer doctor who used experimental therapies. [2]

On October 23, 2006 Lake sentenced Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling to the minimum possible sentence under federal guidelines, 24 years with significantly less time actually expected to be served by Skilling. Lake imposed this rather lenient sentence despite federal laws that would have allowed for significantly longer sentences to act as a deterrent for other white collar criminals.