Martha Stewart and MSO

I suspect that a business built on a personality will suffer if that personality lose value. I'm wondering if that was not part of the intent of the prosecution. This seems like a very minor incident to spend all of this effort on andif she was not intentionally targeted to send a message "if we catch you and you don't cooperate we will ruin you and all those connected with you".

I think MS made a big mistake by not telling the truth from the beginning. If she admitted truthfully from the beginning, and paid any fines, this issue would have died a long time ago. There are too many loopholes to her innocence claim, and no appeal is going to change the verdict - IMHO. She gambled and lost.

I blame her more for not having a "plan B" for her corporation. SHes only been in this for 2 years. Coincidentally today Michael dell stepped down after a planned transition many months in the making. Now Martha, after her conviction, and still sounding as defiant as ever, doesnt have a chance to turn her corp over to a keeper till shes done doing time. so I guess Ill agree that her corp may be in trubble. Maybe we should look at some 'shorting" till it drops or finds a support base. Is buzzardbee a member of a2k?

And , as we ve been finding out, the lie about an act is always more damning than the act. I too would have stated that I followed my brokers advice and knew that this was , really, insider trading and id have to stand for it. Mea culpa , mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Pay the fine, drop the proceeds, pick up the loss, and move on. NOOO, not Martha. of course her lawyer believes shes got a case for appeal. id like to take the odds that it gets tossed.
Maybe he could advise us whether This could be a chance to make some quick cash if the stock isnt too thinly traded.

The argument that everybody does it does not fly, even if they do they are not supposed to. But at the same time she may not have seen anything wrong with what she was doing. The charges of insider trading have been top to bottom and most if not all of the large brokerage firms have paid large fines in the last several years and a number of prominent executives have been charged. A definite pattern is obvious, information is distributed differentially between insiders and outsiders. That's what these brokerage firms sell, their access to information that others do not have. That is why people contract with them, to get an edge. In that case prosecuting Martha Stewart is not going to solve the problem because the problem is structural and not the behavior of "bad apples". Trying to scare people into a mode of behavior that runs counter to their accepted assumptions is counter productive. It results in dissembling not compliance. I do not know enough about the how the securities industry works to offer concrete suggestions but I think the manner in which it works should be thoroughly reviewed with the idea of restructuring how it functions. And particular, the way in which information flows through the system should be one of the prime areas of investigation. The goal should not be, to make a completely equitable system but a set of established rules that every one knows and agrees upon.

I totally agree with your assessment. However, she is charged with lying to authorities. If she had not lied and admitted to what actually happened, she would probably be a free bird today.

It is my understanding that the way in which the prosecution defined "lying" was according to many legal observers somewhat novel. Some of the judge's decisions were also somewhat unique. For example, it was noted on A2K today that the judge had instructed the jury that a telephone log, and testimony by the keeper of that log about the log could be counted as two sources (necessary to prove perjury). In that case, I posted, why not submit the record of the testimony and have three sources. I followed this case only a closely as the New York Times followed it, but there were a number of things about it that struck me as odd.

A trial by jury is not a perfect system, but 12 people determined that she lied, and they heard all the evidence. I'm not about to second guess why the jury found her guilty without complete info.

BTW, I did not agree with the government's case against MS in principal. There are much bigger fishes to fry for bigger crimes, but that's another issue.