She was caught covering up a crime with which she was not charged. This whole thing is a freaking joke. Her company's shareholders should sue the US government for the $ they lost as a result of this witchhunt.
I hear a lot of terms like 'withchunt', 'made an example of her', etc. surrounding the Martha Stewart proceedings, and forgive my ignorance, but what, exactly, is the demographic she is supposed to represent and for which she is being crucified? Not rhetorical, I honestly know next to nothing about the woman.
Those stocks were like pocket changes to her,how stupid of her to destory her whole career and go to jail for such small amount of money.
suspended. . . and 10 yrs PROBATION She won't spend any time in Jail IMO no real time. . . sh*t her lawyers probably had the appeal papers already written Rocket River
Mac I think it stems from the fact that with all the really heinous crimes committed by people from companies like Enron, Credit Lyonnais, Halliburton, Freddie Mac et al. Companies that have cost their employees and shareholders billions of dollars and lost personal retirement accounts, that the government felt it best to go after someone who personally sold her own stock and tried to cover it up (like that never happens on a daily basis). Not saying that what she did was right, but come on! There are much bigger fish to catch. But you know, it's hard to indict the man who wrote your energy policy. Much easier to go after a domestic diva.
I don't understand your complaint. She got caught covering a crime. You even admit it yourself. That's a pretty serious offense.
Or it may be that Martha Stewart's case is easier to prosecute because it was a fairly straight-forward case. You can only really prosecute what you can hope to prove. Justice ran one of the largest accounting firms out of business in teh Enron scandal. They've got Fastow in jail and Skilling under indictment. They've also got indictments against the Adelphia guys, some WorldCom guys, and so on. Perhaps Ken Lay is getting off easy because of his political connections. Perhaps Justice really doesn't think it has enough evidence to make a case against him. I don't know. But it's not as if there aren't people within these companies facing charges for their crimes. It is just hard to understand this call that there should be perfect justice or none at all. All the bad guys should be prosecuted (regardless of whether enough evidence can be had), or else no one should be prosecuted. If Ken Lay isn't properly prosecuted, then no one should be prosecuted even if they commit crimes that are relatively easy to prove and prosecute. It's like saying that because Michael Jackson appears to have managed to buy his way out of a molestation charge in the past that no one should've been charged with lesser forms of child abuse during that time.
When I first heard the news, I thought for sure there would be a thread titled "Martha, Martha, Martha" on this BBS. You let me down nWo
man you should have seen MSO today. btw i've started my job at zonetrading. anyhow...that thing was running up like crazy before the verdict came out and then BAM!! it crashed like no tomorrow. one guy who started not too long ago lost $10,000 today. he was one of the guys gambling and getting greedy. i feel really bad for him. 1 trade down $10,000...that sucks. never ever buy something that has run up that much that fast. it went from 52 week highs to 52 week lows in the course of about an hour.
Nice post MrP. Good points To the lawyers out there. What's the next steps for appeal? Can she appeal?
From the reports and evidence Martha Stewart committed a crime. There are some people who committed worse, but the bottomline is she committed a crime. If I kill one person and someone else kills 10 people, should they ease up on me because I only killed one person? You can call it being a scapegoat, you can call it a witch hunt, but make sure you also call it a crime. She's not the only one to do it, but a crime is a crime.
There are a lot of rich people who can't stand any losses. There are also a lot of really rich people who are very cheap (some of the cheapest people I know are extremely wealthy). It may be that $228K is still a lot to Martha Stewart even though it's a very, very small percentage of her net worth.
Ken Lay wil have his day in court. So far about 28 people have been indited because of Enron and most of them have struck plea bargains. My bet is that part of their plea bargain includes spilling what they know about Ken Lay. It takes time to build these kinds of cases especially when there was a conspiricy in place to hide all the evidence. Just wait. More info on Enron Indictments
