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G. Gordon Liddy wrote a book titled, When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. The Stewart case (and sadly, most of the reaction here) is a perfect example. The crime of insider trading didn't exist until the 1960s. It was created not by an act of Congress, but by a regulatory agency. The "crime" wasn't defined precisely, creating doubt about what's allowed and what isn't. Martha Stewart wasn't an insider at Imclone, so when the SEC accused her of insider trading, it was making law out of thin air. After a year of publicly accusing her of insider trading, the authorities declined to charge her with that crime, but invented another crime, that of contending one is innocent. That was the "securities fraud" charge eventually--and correctly--thrown out by the judge. By denying the charges of insider trading, she supposedly defrauded investors in her own company.

So in the end, the Feds spent $40 million of our money convicting Stewart of lying about a crime she was never charged with. And how can we know she was lying? She had sold 1,000 shares of her own Imclone stock and all of her pension fund's much larger stake in Imclone months earlier--long before the Imclone founder began selling his.

In short, Stewart is as much a victim of prosecutorial excess as Rush Limbaugh is. To paraphrase Liddy, when I was kid, this was a free country, and neither "insider trading" nor "doctor shopping" were crimes.

This is the best description of the situation I have read. Ayn Rand had a lot to say about the danger of "nonobjective laws" that undermine the rule of law and make everyone a criminal. Once everyone is a "criminal" and the law is only the word of the biggest criminal to get control of the system, you are well on the way to a totalitarian state.

Our system is best described as a cleptocracy, where wealth and favors are distributed to the most vocal special interest goup of the moment. That these same people want to enforce "justice" and "fairness" is laughable double-speak.

the Feds spent $40 million of our money convicting Stewart of lying about a crime she was never charged with.

So if the Enron/WorldCom people shredded documents, deleted emails, burned journals and destroyed phone logs after a federal investigation had started and otherwise hindered a federal investigation, you would agree to let them go?

Did you also support Hillary when she 'lost' her billing records.

"Martha Stewart wasn't an insider at Imclone, so when the SEC accused her of insider trading, it was making law out of thin air. "

Actually, you don't have to be an insider to be guilty of "insider trading." If you are the "tipee" and you know that the "tipper" has a fiduciary duty to the company, you can't use the tippers insider information and trade based on that. Given that, though, I don't think that her broker would be a fiduciary as to the company.

The whole time that this case has been underway, I've never been able to figure out (aside from the bogus "securities fraud" charge that was dropped) just what the government's theory was with regard to her wrongdoing. Can someone explain? The news media hasn't been very good at explaining it.