It's not every day that a prominent white-collar defendant makes an impassioned public defense barely a month before his criminal trial is set to start.

Federal prosecutors, freed of the need to build a case against their most prominent defendant, can now bear down on them.

"They'd be sitting ducks," said a lawyer for one prominent defendant.

He was one of the more prominent defendants in Mobile's whiskey trials of 1924 and 1925.

And many said one conviction, even of such a prominent defendant, could not erode a wall of cynicism built over generations.

His fate is also being watched closely to see if a prominent and once-powerful defendant receives the same treatment as a lesser one.

From the start, the prosecution maintained that the trial of General Noriega would be "just another drug case," albeit one with an unusually prominent defendant.

In May 2010 she spoke out against prominent defendants, their family members, and judges being treated as celebrities.

Plea negotiations collapsed on Friday between the government and two prominent defendants in the Enron criminal cases, people involved in the case said.

But more than just numbers, the debate over several prosecutions of prominent defendants has turned on questions of tactics and motives.