In particular, the plea provided the government with the admission that huge transactions that played a central role in Enron's collapse were indeed illegal.
Beyond that, Mr. Brown would offer no particulars about the plea agreement.
The judge walked him through the particulars of the plea deal, and he answered every question in a deep, oddly adult voice.
The humorous particulars of the plea (the connoisseur who calls himself "Nightlark," the title that sounds like the work of a French flaneur) will surely stoke the energies of lexicographic sleuths the world over.
Around our house, we get the kind of calls that may interrupt your dinner, too — sales reps offering chimney cleaning, recordings of celebrities urging us to vote for particular candidates and pleas from our alma mater telling us that if we really loved her, we'd show it with cash.
In order to guarantee that he will receive a life sentence in this particular case, we submitted the plea agreement to the court in advance of the plea.
("I've got one ear that sticks out a little further than the other, and I've got a crooked middle finger on one hand," he said. "The thing that made me end up taking a guilty plea was one particular teller, she had me down from head to toe").
"The church has been able to stimulate conversation" around the issue, he said, citing in particular Pope John Paul II's successful plea to the late Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri, to commute the sentence of a murderer to life in prison without parole.
He said he had read the jury's note as a "plea... to exercise particular mercy".
Instead, as Andrew Kirkman observes, it communicated a desperate plea for mercy — in particular, "the desire to shorten the time in purgatory that, short of sainthood and immediate passage to paradise, would follow earthly life".
