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It is just sickening how much power these low life prosecutors have.

What am I missing here? Did some prosecutor sentence Martha Stewart to prison? I thought they had to have a trial, with a judge and a jury and stuff. Did they skip over that part?

Or is it that judges and juries are stupid and lame, and we shouldn't allow such idiots to decide things like this? And if that's true, what system should we have instead?

When OJ walked, the story was that anybody with enough money to buy the right lawyers could get away with murder. This time it's that anybody with a lot of money will automatically be convicted. This time it's all about class warfare. Why?

I had the impression that there had been a trial. And some jury sat there and listened to both sides of the argument, and decided that she was guilty as charged.

I would never claim that juries are 100% accurate, but we used to have an agreement among ourselves as citizens that this system is how we settle these disputes. There is an appeals process, and that has yet to play out. It may well be that there was some error in the trial and that one or more of her convictions will be overturned. I do not claim to know.

But I still have the same reaction to rants like Farah's that I have to the Mayor of San Francisco marrying gays. "Yes, the law says X, but we don't want that. We want it to be some other way instead. Never mind that there was Grand Jury indictment and a jury trial. We don't like it."

I don't understand the utility in proclaiming that the legal system is broken, so we should have mob rule instead. In San Francisco the mob is gay, so never mind the law, let's do what the mob wants. Martha Stewart has a mob of "fans," and they know better than the jury whether Ms. Stewart is guilty. So never mind the trial, let's do what the mob wants. There cannot be good news down this path.

And in Washington DC the mob is Republican and Democrat. The accounting tricks they are using now are just as bad as those used by Enron. The whole reason they went so aggressively after Martha and the others is they didn't want to take the blame for the bad economy during the 2002 midterm elections.

Good points.

And some jury sat there and listened to both sides of the argument, and decided that she was guilty as charged.

True enough. But we are not so unsophisticated as to believe there's no such thing as a "showcase prosecution," and this one certainly smells like one - no "Eat the Rich" implications about it. Everything I've been able to read about this case tells me that Stewart was prosecuted for lying to the feds about a crime they established she didn't commit - insider trading. Was she guilty of lying? Yes, the jury has spoken. But I'd feel more comfortable knowing just how often and how hard such cases are routinely prosecuted before I wrote the episode off as "just one of those things."

Limbaugh's illegal pill purchases are another example of this kind of thing. Almost universally, prescription drug addicts are given a pass if they cooperate with authorities and seek treatment. Not that there are many good Samaritans to be found among prosecutors, but because there's rarely a chain of evidence or "risk to the community" in such cases to make it worth the while. But give a prosecutor - essentially a lawyer in apprenticeship for public office - a shot at getting his name in the paper for six months, and they would prosecute their own mothers for littering.