Martha Stewart was convicted Friday of obstructing justice and lying to the government about a superbly timed stock sale, a devastating verdict that probably means prison for the woman who epitomizes meticulous homemaking and gracious living.
The jury of eight women and four men deliberated three days before convicting Stewart of all counts against her. The charges carry up to 20 years in prison, but Stewart will most certainly get much less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.
Her ex-stockbroker Peter Bacanovic, 41, was convicted on all but one count against him, making a false statement.
The charges centered on why Stewart dumped about $228,000 worth of ImClone Systems stock on Dec. 27, 2001, just a day before it was announced that the Food and Drug Administration had rejected ImClone’s application for approval of a cancer drug, an announcement sent ImClone’s stock plummeting.
Now I’ve seen a number of documentaries concerning women’s prisons on the Spice Channel… I wonder how Martha’s going to handle the Dominatrix prison warden with the fake German accent?
I smell the same sort of distraction used to divert American focus from Afghanistan to Iraq. While I believe Martha committed a crime, I’d rather see more focus on global level corporate crimes - like Enron. Screw this petty $40K nonsense.
From a prosecutor’s perspective, the value of Martha Stewart as a defendant is the visibility not the $ amount. High profile case with lots and lots of media exposure does two things: 1) Sends a visible message to other corporate officers as to the power of the lying to federal investigators charge; 2) Gives a nice boost to a U.S. Attorney’s political ambitions.
As to larger fish, note the MCI/WorldCom indictment that came down yesterday, and Skilling of Enron was indicted just the other week.
The irony of it is that she wasn’t guilty of insider trading. Which the prosecutors knew and didn’t even bother charging her with. They went after obstruction of justice.
No the thing that got tossed out was they charged her for somehow fixing her stock. Basically because she publicly proclaimed her innocence the stock price went up on her company, the prosecutors tried to somehow argue that it was a crime. That was thrown out because it was too stupid.
“Associated Press wires Thursday, June 5, described that the “securities fraud” charge against Stewart represented a “new twist” in the prosecution’s case. To put that in plain English, the prosecution is trying to create a criminal case that goes far beyond the boundaries of established criminal law. Stewart, in publicly proclaiming her innocence of the “crime” of insider trading, committed a crime because her statements apparently had a positive effect upon the stock price of her company.”
Yep, the charge of lying to a federal investigator is an incredibly powerful weapon. The standard DOJ method of investigating an organization: Take 2 employees, place them in separate rooms, question, compare notes. If the two stories don’t agree, threaten one or both with the obstruction of justice charge.
Moral of the story: keep your mouth shut. Because even if they can’t prove you did anything illegal, they’ll take what you say and nail you with it regardless.
But, it’s okay, because it’s a celebrity not some crackhead. Equality in lack of justice for all!
Yes hurrah, burn her at the stake because shes rich. If you followed the trial you’d have seen that this was nothing more than a witch hunt by the DOJ.
For any crime one should look at the victims to see how bad it is. So who were the victims of Martha Stewarts crime? The share holders of imclone? Not really the stock was going to fall anyway because of the FDA was going to make that happen in a day or so. The DOJ was still successful in taking down the CEO of Imclone so not having Martha rat him out didn’t mess that case up. So who were Martha Stewart’s victims?
The people or institutions that bought the stock from her a price much, much higher than it would be a day later, that’s who. They lost tens of thousands of dollars.
Yeah, what did she hurt? Well, she profited by insider news that other people didn’t have. She sold her shares before the rest of the public got the news about Imclone’s FDA problems. But I guess all is fair in love and commerce, eh?
The people or institutions that bought the stock from her a price much, much higher than it would be a day later, that’s who. They lost tens of thousands of dollars.[/quote]
So thats like what 228k? Compare that to the taxpayer money spent on the trail. And remember she is not guilty of insider trading because she is not an insider. If you sell a stock because someone says its going to go down thats fine. The CEO of Imclone is the insider.
Also the people buying those stocks understand there is a risk it would go down (especially if they knew that the FDA was ruling the next day) it was a gamble they took, either the ruling would be good and they would make money or bad and they’d lose. If they didn’t understand the risk they shouldn’t have been in the stock market.
Just to make sure we understand, say she had sold the stock without the info from the Imclone guy. The stock goes down, are those victims still victims?
