Minutes after the jurors and the judge had cleared out of the courtroom today, Mr. Lay's family members huddled around him. Elizabeth Vittor, Mr. Lay's daughter and a lawyer who had worked on his defense team, sobbed uncontrollably. Two local ministers also leaned in and hugged Mr. Lay, whose family members soon formed a circle in the courtroom, with arms over shoulders, and cried together. "I know, I know," Mr. Lay said in a soothing voice to several of them, as they clutched at his suit coat.

Mr. Lay was forced to remain in the courthouse for more than three hours after the verdict was announced for a hearing on securing a $5 million bond, which will come from a mix of financial pledges from his children, and to surrender his passport.

Judge Lake will have broad discretion in determining the former executives' sentences. He is not known for his leniency. Two years ago he sentenced Jamie Olis, a former midlevel executive at Dynegy, to 24 years for his role in a scheme to disguise the company's finances. An appeals court last year ordered the judge to revise the sentence. A hearing is set for June 9. The guilty verdicts could have limited impact on a spate of civil cases. "They are not the ones who are going to pay the billions of dollars in additional recoveries that we hope to obtain on top of the $7.2 billion we already have from banks in our previous settlements," said William S. Lerach, the lead lawyer in the largest civil case, set to go to trial in October.

Image Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former Enron chief executive and president, left, with his lawyer, Dan Petrocelli. Credit... Pat Sullivan/Associated Press

From the beginning, the Enron leaders' trial was not what many people expected after revelations of secret off-the-books schemes that earned a small fortune for Andrew S. Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer, and his cadre of co-conspirators. Those transactions were used to artificially prop up the company's profits, but prosecutors never seriously attempted to prove that Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling were responsible for them.

Rather than delve into whether those intricate accounting structures were legitimate, prosecutors focused almost exclusively on what they cited as the false statements Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay made to employees and outside investors.

The "lies and choices" theme transformed the case into a test of credibility between the former chief executives and the more than half a dozen witnesses from inside Enron who testified for the government.