In Margaret Heffernan’s brilliant book, Willful Blindness, she describes her first direct encounter with the state was in the Judge’s instructions at the end of the Enron trial.   “You may find that the defendant deliberately closed his eyes to what would otherwise have been obvious to him.  Knowledge can be inferred if the defendant deliberately blinded himself to the existence of a fact.”

Heffernan notes that many of the greatest crimes are not committed in the dark, but in full view of people who chose not to look and not to question.   The Catholic Church, the SEC, Nazi Germany, Madoff’s funds, the embers of British Petroleum’s refinery, and the dog-eat-dog world of sub-prime lenders, all willfully blind.    Willful Blindness