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So summer, you seem like a nice person from your posts. But the people who went after Ms. Stewart are not. They are merely ambitious attorneys who are allergic to real work, and see the government as a way to climb the social ladder. They look at Rudy Giuliani - who used high profile Wall Street prosecutions that featured the now famous 'Perp Walk', a marketing gig invented by him (he would call the press and tell them when an executive was going to be arraigned) - and they want to do the same thing. So they look for a fish. And this one had blonde hair.

Read this: Martha is Innocent and then tell me what you think about what you've been seeing in the media.

I actually had not followed this case up until a few days ago, because as I said, she's not exactly a pleasant person. But the thing that caught everyone's attention was the charge the judge dismissed: the prosecutors charged her with fraud for pleading innocent, which they alleged was a fraudulent scheme to keep her stock price up, even though she "knew she was guilty"! Something like that is straight out of a Communist show trial. And it makes all the other charges suspect. Even the judge politely called it a "Novel" theory. Novel is damn right: it inverts all of Anglo-Saxon law for 1000 years.

As far as why she was not charged with "insider trading", I'm not sure, but I think I know why: "Insider Trading" is not a Federal crime listed in the United States Code. I think it is only part of the SEC regulations, which are not laws of the United States, but rules of a particular agency of the United States, for which you can only be fined (or lose certain privileges, such as a Broker's license). Someone on this thread may correct me, I'm too lazy to go to Findlaw and look it up myself.

But that in itself is a story. In Europe, "insider trading" is not a crime, and in the U.S., it happens all the time, it simply must be disclosed. In this case, I don't think you could even make a civil case of it, since her broker told her, not the other 'insider', Waksal. She and the broker don't constitute an insider group, so all they could do was nail her on some small fibs about how it actually happened. And if you read the other article, that hinges on simple wording - it appears that she was trying to avoid the impression that it was insider trading.

The whole thing is jive that wouldn't have made it to the docket if her name wasn't Martha and she wasn't a dislikable blonde. Even the juror who talked basically said he wanted to convict because she was a big fish - leading to the question, would he have convicted if the accused were merely some no-name investor?

I leave you to ponder these reality checks. Personally, I think a nice little civil fine with restitution might have been the most she should have gotten.