Although I'm not convinced Martha Stewart should have been prosecuted so vehemently for her relatively minor crimes, the accounts of how her jurors reached a verdict are renewing my confidence in the jury system. She really did break the law, the law itself is just, and the jurors convicted her even though they felt sorry for her predicament.
"I choked up and I felt my eyes tearing and I was very relieved that the judge read the verdict, because I wasn't sure if I would have to do that," jury forewoman Rosemary McMahon said Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America." ...As I said, I'm not convinced she should have been prosecuted, but I do think the laws are important for protecting the integrity of capitalism and the big fish should be at least as scared of violating them as the little fish are.Despite their sympathy for Stewart, the jury's decision to convict her of lying about a stock sale was made "after careful consideration of everything that we had," McMahon said. "We did what we had to do."
Martha Stewart obviously wasn't very afraid.
Prosecutors had offered Stewart a chance last April to plead guilty to just one of the four charges against her — making a false statement — in exchange for a probation sentence, Newsweek reported Sunday, citing unidentified sources close to the case. But a defense source told the magazine that prosecutors could not guarantee that Stewart would avoid jail time completely and Stewart refused the offer, Newsweek reported. ...The jurors also said they believed other key prosecution witnesses in the case against Stewart, including Bacanovic assistant Douglas Faneuil (search), and were puzzled that the defense spent less than an hour presenting its case after weeks of prosecution testimony.
The defense team told jurors, "don't believe it. It didn't happen, so don't believe it," McMahon said. "But we ... were sitting there going, but we saw this and we heard that. And, you know, we have evidence of this. And, you know, testimony of that. So it was like, we need more. You know? We were waiting. We were hoping."
Ah, so saying you're not guilty of a crime that you haven't been charged with, is obstructing justice and such a law is "just"?
You are a communist-- we have just had someone convicted based on nothing more than their friends testimoney-- testimony that the friend admitted later "might have been what she'd thought Martha thought".
In other words-- the KGB is alive and well.
And of course, you support "the law". What a communist you are.
DG: There's more to the charges against her than that, as you should know if you've been paying attention. Among other things, she altered records that were under investigation, which is a crime even if the investigation were to show no other wrongdoing.
I fail to see what any of that has to do with communism. The crimes she committed were pretty obvious, and although $200,000 is small to her, that money came out of someone else's pocket.
If you continue insulting me, I'm going to start deleting your posts.
Congratulations, Michael: you've picked up a troll. That must mean you've hit the big time. :)
RC: Oh yeah! Now that I look at it that way, I'm actually pretty flattered. Carry on, Mr. Galt.
Although I don't tend to go for the "others are getting away with more" excuse, I do think there is a question of selective prosecution. The feds wanted to make an example of someone, but I think this may have been a poor choice of cases. Most likely, though, Stewart was guilty of insider trading. As is often the case, people can get in worse trouble trying to cover something up than to come clean. If she had come clean, she could have settled for a civil fine. On the other hand, there are numerous poor who end up pleading guilty to crimes that they could get exonerated for but for the ability of their attorney to devote any decent amount of time to the case. In lesser cases, public defenders usually don't speak to their clients until shortly before the trial. Martha Stewart could hire the best.
JT: Yeah, I don't feel too sorry for her, but I do think she was persecuted a bit. I feel bad for her investors, who are the real losers here. Of course, it's their fault in a way for investing in a criminal. Eh.
Stewart was so guilty of insider trading the government didn't prosecute her for it! Instead, they prosecuted her for lying--while not under oath--to them. How's that again?
RC: Yeah, after reading Mark Steyn on it I'm starting to think it was pretty bogus. Still though, aside from the justice aspect, she probably was insider trading and probably had done so many times in the past. It's unfortunate that that crime is so hard to prove, because it undermines the whole capitalist system.