It's happened many times before. Anderson Consulting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen), then one of the "Big 5" accounting companies, suffered a "sentence first, verdict afterwords" execution when they were prosecuted for their putative crimes in the Enron debacle.
The reversal by the Supreme Court a few years later was cold comfort to the shell of the company that was left, the 85,000 people it once employed, the partners who lost the value of their holdings in the company, etc.
(And this hysteria lead to Sar-Box, which just happened to be the final nail in the coffin of the traditional IPO startup exit except for a very few massive successes.)
The reversal by the Supreme Court a few years later was cold comfort to the shell of the company that was left, the 85,000 people it once employed, the partners who lost the value of their holdings in the company, etc.
(And this hysteria lead to Sar-Box, which just happened to be the final nail in the coffin of the traditional IPO startup exit except for a very few massive successes.)