It wasn't so much a court ruling as it was a jury verdict, but Houstonians everywhere let out either a sigh of relief or a gleeful shout of schadenfreude when a jury of their peers came down hard on Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The city had lived through five years of the post-collapse soap opera, enduring all of it with the nagging fear that the city's most expensive criminal lawyers just might succeed in getting their clients off. Luckily, those clients had to take the stand, and both of them -- especially the prickly Lay -- practically erased any chance for an acquittal. Houston could breathe easy again. Now we only have to worry about the best appellate lawyers money can buy.