5 months for Martha!

[funkybutt]

coworker's husband works for a news organization. so i don't have a link

[lectrobyte]

1. seems pretty harsh, all things considered. Ken Lay better get

life then!

[funkybutt]

2. no shit

[frankly_fedup2]

14. Surely you jest??

Only 5 months for insider trading and lying to the Government and obstruction of justice.

I guess there are sentencing guidelines for them and totally different for us.

This woman was a billionaire, and because she was afraid of losing a couple hundred thousand dollars, she told her stockbroker (who turned states evidence against her and what got her convicted), to sell the stock . . . to get rid of it so she didn't lose money.

Now if she had not started out as a stock broker on the actual floor of the Stock Exchange itself, one would think she did not know what she was doing was so wrong. However, at one time, this woman had clients and worked the floor of the stock exchange for them. Then she got into the modeling and the rest is history.

I don't know why I'm so outraged considering the justice system (run by Ashcroft) is so corrupted since this administration has totally abused the Patriot Act, which abuses our rights.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

23. She was NOT convicted for insider trading

she was convicted for lying.

[Warpy]

3. She was never convicted of a real crime

She was convicted of "making false statements" and "obstruction of justice." In other words, this gal has just been convicted of exercising her fifth amendment right not to self incriminate!

She is irrelevant. What is relevant is that another of the Bill of Rights has just been stripped from us. Mourn for that, not for her.

[GiovanniC]

4. Thank God They've Cleaned the Scum Off the Streets

I will feel much safer walking outside at dark knowing that Martha Stewart is tucked away behind bars.

[AP]

6. She most definitely was convicted of a real crime.

Republicans more than some Dems want you to think that financial crimes like these aren't really crimes. They are crimes.

[Snellius]

9. She wasn't convicted of a "financial crime"

She was convicted of lying to the FBI.

[AP]

11. She lied to cover up a crime. She rolled the dice.

She knew that her corporation traded on her good character, so she refused to plea. She Thought that if she didn't fight it and win, she could lose 1 billion dollars in equity in MSL-O. She correctly assumed that any plea admitting guilt was as good as a conviction. She decided that prison was worth the risk if it could save her a billion dollars.

She had no business pleading inncocent.

Jeffrey Toobin had a great article on this in the NY'er.

[GiovanniC]

10. They Couldn't Convict Her On the Insider Trading Charges

Their case was too flimsy. They dropped the charges because there wasn't enough evidence.

They prosecuted her for lying/obstruction -- for saying that she did not commit the crime they could not prove she had committed.

That said, the children are now safe to play outside again.

[AP]

13. They could have tried. The statute doesn't totally preclude what she did.

That they didn't try is probably more evidence of the perogratives of being rich and white.

However, the crimes they did charge her with weren't trivial. She lied, and tried to cover it up, and she did it to cover her tracks after she basically robbed strangers of about 100K.

It saddens me to see Democrats arguing that corporate criminals don't deserve to be punished for their crimes.

Would you have this kind of sympathy if a black man robbed you in a dark alley?

[GiovanniC]

16. A Couple Things

First, there IS a difference between corporate/financial crime and violent crime. Both are obviously wrong, but they are different.

Second, if a black man robbed me in a dark alley (First off, what fucking difference does it make if he's black? Why throw that bullshit in there in the first place?)... IF a black man robbed me in a dark alley, and the police arrested a black man and charged him with it but there wasn't enough evidence to prove that he actually committed the crime, my reaction AS A DEMOCRAT is that if a jury of his peers cannot find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then he walks. That's because to me, AS A DEMOCRAT, Justice is bigger than that one guy. It's bigger than me, too.

I don't argue that corporate criminals don't deserve to be punished for their crimes. But if the prosecutors could prove that she did the insider trading, they should have. And if they couldn't, then they shouldn't have charged her with saying she didn't do it, period.

[AP]

19. Yeah, a poor guy robs you because he's starving. Martha because she can.

The crimes she was convicted of may not have been insider trading, but they're serious in their own way. That's why they're crimes.

[GiovanniC]

20. The Crime She Was Convicted Of Was Saying She's Innocent

Did you rape your neighbor last night?

If you say yes and confess, I will get you for rape.

If you lie and say you are innocent, I will get you for lying.

You're going down one way or another.

[AP]

21. Wrong. The crime of which she was convicted was trying to mislead

investigators so they wouldn't know she was guilty of something else she knew was wrong. (Think, "filing a false police report," or "perjury" -- these are things our society accepts are crimes.)

And they offered her a deal she wouldn't take becuase she knew the value of her corp depended on her good character.

The government did her a favor by not charging her with insider trading. But she was definitely guilty of the things of which she was convicted.

[GiovanniC]

25. If You Have Proof That Martha Stewart Engaged In Illegal Insider Trading

I would love to see it.

Lacking that proof, however, I cannot say that Martha Stewart WAS lying or obstructing justice when she told investigators that she did not engage in illegal insider trading. And, lacking that proof, neither can you.

Furthermore, even assuming that she did, in fact, engage in illegal insider trading, it is not a crime for her to not make the government's case, which is basically what she was tried and convicted of.

[AP]

27. Do you know how silly that sounds? That's the equivalent of saying

until you show me that Bernie Ebbers was guilty of insider trading, I'm not going to believe he was guilty of fraud.

The questiong the investigators asked her was NOT "did you engage in insider trading?" It was, did you talk to X? Did you make a notation here? Did you get order W to do Z?" She lied about all those things to investigators. That's a crime in an of itself, which is punishable (I presume) by much less time in prison than insider trading.

Do you really think that people should be able to like like that with impunity when they're being investigated? She wasn't just providing evidence against herself. She had information about other people's potential crimes, and she was intentionally and knowingly leading investigators on wild goose chases for those other people too.

She could have pled the fifth if she wanted to, but she knew that even that could cost her millions of dollars in her holdings of her own stock.

She made decisions about telling the truth based on financial considerations. And now she's suffering the consequences.

[AP]

24. Read this, by Scott Turow

{Stewart apologists} repeatedly noted that Ms. Stewart was charged only with lying after the fact about the stock sale, but not with securities fraud for the transaction itself. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example, said there "was something strange about prosecuting someone for obstructing justice over a crime that the government doesn't claim happened." And some feminists have suggested that Ms. Stewart was being penalized for being a powerful woman.

I don't buy any of it. What the jury felt Martha Stewart did — lying about having received inside information before she traded — is wrong, really wrong. And the fact that so many on Wall Street have unashamedly risen to her defense is galling — galling because what she did actually harms the market. Wall Street leaders should be expressing chagrin that a corporate tycoon — who was also a member of the New York Stock Exchange board — could feel free to fleece an unwitting buyer.

Virtually everybody who takes Ms. Stewart's side conveniently ignores the fact that there was some poor schmo (or schmoes) out there who bought her shares of ImClone. Those buyers, no matter how diligent, no matter how much market research they read, no matter how many analysts' reports they studied, could not have known what Martha Stewart did: that the Waksal family was dumping shares. In my book, that's fraud. Martha Stewart ripped her buyers off as certainly as if she'd sold them silk sheets that she knew were actually synthetic.

...

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the whole case, to me anyway, is how the arguments in defense of Ms. Stewart show a widespread mentality that is all too comfortable with unwarranted privilege. It is yet another example of how justice is very different for the rich and poor.

...

To be sure, Martha Stewart, Peter Bacanovic and their lawyers have every right to complain loud and long about allegedly perjured testimony. But like most of the caterwauling that has gone on in this case, these cries of outrage cannot change the fundamental facts. The jury convicted her not because of anything Larry Stewart said, but for the reason juries are supposed to: there was solid proof that Martha Stewart deliberately violated common standards of honesty and decency, and lied about it when she was caught. And it is only the privilege the law sometimes extends to the well-to-do that explains why she was not convicted of more.


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70E17F9395A0C748EDDAC0894DC404482

[Warpy]

17. check out what she was convicted of

She was NEVER CHARGED WITH INSIDER TRADING!!!!!!!!!!

Get real. She was charged with not incriminating herself.

[AP]

22. She wasn't charged with 100s of crimes. That doesn't mean she's innocent

of the ones they charged her with and convicted her of.

[AP]

26. That inside trading laws didn't CLEARLY cover MS, suggests laws are a joke

That's one of the arguments Turow makes in that article I just quoted in my last post.

IIRC, the article argues that the gov't could have tried to charge her with insider trading laws too, but they velt they were too vaguely worded to get a conviction without having to go through a very long trial and a series of appeals (which might have resulted in such a clearly defined loophole that hundreds of insiders would have walked through it with impunity as a result -- better to leave insider traders guessing until the legislature steps up and clearly includes Martha, than give people a roadmap for breaking the law with impunity).


Turow argues, the laws wouldn't have clearly have addressed what Stewart did, but they should have. He sayst that the vague wording helps white collar criminals -- they are so lawyered up and rich, that unless there is really clear evidence (eg, Ebbers) they don't get tried.

The thing with Stewart -- if you had read the NY'er article by Toobin -- was that she was really brazen, got bad advice from her lawyer, didn't prep for her meeting with the FBI, and persisted in telling lies because she thought she'd get away with it.

In other words, she gave the prosecution all the evidence they needed, which is unusual.

[LittleApple81]

5. You know, I am VERY SORRY for her. She did WRONG but compared

to the other corporate criminals she is a veritable lamb. But at the same time, if she got 5 months for, what was it, $250,000??? (I don't even remember the amount) which did not ruin millions of people, the other guys BETTER get YEARS of prison.
However, I saw somewhere in DU (I should really bookmark a whole bunch of stuff because I don't remember where) that of all the cases they have already looked at a very small percentage have ended up with prison terms.

[underpants]

7. $298,00 on the sale-cost$260,000= profit of $38,000

That is a month for each $7,600 of profit.

and how much did they spend on the prosecution??????

[underpants]

8. Almost forgot-she wasn't charged with the sale of the stocks

only with lying to investigators.

[LittleApple81]

12. Lying? I thought that was a RW value...wait, she is not a RW person.n/t

[indigobusiness]

15. They should've hung by her thumbs

for her abject lack of contrition.

Honesty would've saved her, and everyone, all of this.

Shameful? Yes?

Bitter? Absolutely.

Saint Martha burns...sort of.

[Walt Starr]

18. Martha was framed on trumped up charges

because she is a stron, successful Democratic woman.

Nothing more.

[AP]

28. No she wasn't. The government offered her a deal. She didn't take it

because it would have implied an admission of wrong-doing.

MS is in a very unique professional situation. She owns stock in company that is built on one thing: herself, her name and her character.

At one point, her stock in that company was worth about 1 billion dollars.

She knew that if she admitted guilt, it would have reduced the value of that equity -- and becuase she had alot, there was alot to lose, so she made a BUSINESS decision to challenge the charges. She forced the government's hand.

You know, even after she was convicted (and before sentencing) she issued a press release saying that she was not guilty in order to preserve equity value in MSLO. Her lawyer called her up and told her to take it off the company's web site because one of the things they consider at sentencing is your contrition. Denying that she was guilty prior to sentencing was going to result in a longer sentence.