What really happened to Martha Stewart?

I have heard two competing theories lately:

A) Stewart was not guilty of insider trading, but they got her for perjury and trying to make herself look less guilty than she actually was, ie falsifying evidence

B) Stewart actually was guilty of insider trading, but they plea bargained her down to lesser charges

Any comments? And yes, I know that they were happy to make an example of a Democratic woman instead of a Republican man in her case.

Thanks.

even though she probably was guilty, she was not found guilty of insider trading

an easy home run on the things they charged her with so they didn't bother trying to swing for the bleachers on the difficult pitch of insider trading.

They didn't have a case to make for insider trading, so they convicted her on lying about a crime she didn't commit. I personally don't understand the legalese of that.

falsifying evidence, even if you are never charged with the underlying crime.

The consitution allows you not to give evidence against yourself. It doesn't allow you to manufacture falsified evidence in order to protect yourself.

You can refuse to talk to the government, but you can't falsify evidence and lie to them when they're investigating a transaction that was actually part of crime that was committed (Waksal did go to jail for his part of this transaction).

They had to drop the insider trading charges for lack of evidence.

Just like Clinton. Set em up in a false investigation, that falls apart and they stick them with a technicality that should have never happened.

and not being a good ole buddy of Bush.

Ken Lay is still fatcatting around and I have to wait for three more months until i can have some goddamn cookie recipes.:wtf:

However, what she was initially guilty of was no different than what was considered to be "business as usual" in the '80's when I had droves of clients making piles of money in the Financial District.

Certainly it was far less a crime than what * did with Harkin Energy. But the SEC doesn't investigate when your the Pres's son.

It makes me want to scream.

She was scapegoated. . .big time.

doesnt' mean we should all turn a blind eye.

doesnt' mean we should all turn a blind eye when it happens.

I think that Stewart took this too far because her financial interest in her own company meant that she was willing to take a bigger gamble on being convicted. If the difference between innocense at trial and an admission of guilt in a plea bargain is worth about 300 million bucks in the value of your company's stock, you might take the risk of 9 months in jail. Even if you're convicted, you'll come out with 700 million left over.

Her other problem was that she didn't take the charges very seriously. She ignored the advice of her lawyers (and apparently, the advice she did follow was bad advice) and didn't prepare for her depositions, so she ended up digging herself into a deeper hole. Had she spent some time preparing for her deposition with a good criminal lawyer, and if she had a better appreciation of the nature of the case against her, she might have done a few things differently in the conduct of her defense.

and she gave money to Democrats.

investigate such a high profile case when everyone knew that something fishy happened (remember, this was part of a transactioin that resulted in the conviction of Sam Waksal), and then in the inevitable investigation she committed a crime. The gov't gave her every chance to avoid a trial and jail time, but she decided to take her chances at trial. She lost because the evidence was pretty incriminating.

Plea bargains involve a plea of guilty, which saves the state the expense of a trial, which is why they are offered.

Stewart was never charged with insider trading because they knew full well they could never get the charges to stick.

That they got her on "lying to investigators," NOT PERJURY is why we always should invoke our fifth amendment rights and refuse to answer investigator questions except through a lawyer. She didn't think she'd done anything wrong, but she'd "lied" about an email she'd erased (like she only gets one or two a day and can keep track of them all) and that is what they convicted her on.

This whole thing smells to high heaven. Meanwhile, Kennyboy Lay is as free as a bird.

because the admission of guilt would have ramifications on the sort of business in which she could be engaged.

within the category of "insider" to the company whose stock she was trading. Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker wrote that this is a big problem with the insider trading statute and that congress should repair it so that it clearly covers people like Stewart (because the concerns are exactly the same for her as they are for people clearly inside the company: they have information that gives them an unfair advantage over the rest of the market participants).

However, there was a clearly written statute about lying to federal investigators, which she clearly broke.

So, rather than have a prolonged trial on the gray area of whether this was insider trading, she was charged with the violation of statute that clearly applied to her. In this respect, the government went easy on her. They could have made life more difficult for her by charging her with insider trading. Some may say this is a prerogative of wealth. Perhaps if she weren't as wealthy, the government would have taken its chances with that charge because they wouldn't expect an all-out, no-holds-barred, endlessly appealed, lawyered-up defense from her.

Anyway, the gov't did offer her a plea on the charge that was very generous, but because Martha owns a billion dollars company that depends on her good name she decided that the best thing to do would be to keep claiming innocence even though the evidence was pretty clear. She rolled the dice and lost the bet, but might think that a couple months in jail is more valuable for her long term if she can keep claiming that she was innocent.

Martha was found guilty of lying about a stock trade - however, their was NOT convicted of wrong doing on that stock trade.

So,
a) If the trade was legal - then why was it a lie?
b) Did she lie about said stock trade?
c) They couldn't prosecute her for insider trading because they didn't have enough evidence.

Oh, and OJ is playing golf in Florida!

:wtf:

wasnt' convicted of racketeering at the trial that convicted him of tax.

You're saying that unless your convicted of the worst thing you might have done, you shouldn't be guilty of all the smaller illegal things you did in the course of that other bigger thing.

And even if Capone were never guilty of doing anything bigger than tax evasion, doesn't mean he was innocent of tax evasion.

If there was nothing wrong with the trade, then how can you say she was guilty of covering it up?


Capone argument is not relevent.

telling people about trades that came from information he was spreading, and sharing information within the brokerage like that was a violation of SEC rules (and the SEC charges against her and the firm are still pending).

Just because she wasn't charged with the most serious offense doesn't mean that she's not guilty of any lesser offense that she committed that were related to the questionable transaction.

Capone was never charged with the most serious offenses with which his business was connected. Perhaps he did cover his tracks well enough. Perhaps he didn't fall precisely within the law on charges of murder or racketeering. But he did commit income tax evasion, which was a minor transaction within the bigger picture.

That's what happened to Stewart. Maybe she never would have been charged with insider trading. But the feds were investigating the trade because it related to Waksal's investigation AND because there are still another half dozen charges the SEC will bring against her and the brokerage. She tried to screw up all those investigations by lying about the evidence.

That's what she was convicted of doing.

When the SEC violations are prosecuted and if she's convicted, will you stop saying that the transaction was legal?

$33 MILLION this week when Kmart and Sears merged.

And it was legal and while she is dressed in that nice shade of orange.

Where did I go wrong?

and altered version of A is correct. She was not guilty and was arrested for saying she was not guilty and the judge never allowed the fact that she was never charged with the crime she's accused of covering up to be told to the jury!

Since the jury was hearing all the charges against her, don't you think they would have figured out that one of the charges they weren't hearing was one of insider trading?

You think they needed to be told that? And, anyway, I'm sure that her lawyers' closing arguments included a reminder that there was no insider trading charge.

Where'd you get the impression that this was an issue at the trial? Do you have a link?

But is doing time for hubris.