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Non-Tech : Martha Stewart -- Scourge or Scapegoat -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Labrador who wrote (71)	2/20/2004 8:20:02 AM
From: jrhana	Respond to of 165

Besides these people are trained to entrap you If you read through Blodgett's descriptions, you see that all was based on hand scribbled notes not verbatim recordings. They have complete power to twist your words around anyway they want. Wasn't this whole thing about less than .1% of Martha Stewarts's net worth at he time? I mean 4000 shares for Pete's sake.

To: Labrador who wrote (71)	3/8/2004 10:13:34 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 165

Martha Stewart's Appeal Won't Be Easy washingtonpost.com Lawyers May Claim Judge Wouldn't Let Them Mount Their Best Defense By Brooke A. Masters Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page A10 NEW YORK, March 5 -- During Martha Stewart's criminal trial, her lead attorney, Robert G. Morvillo, complained repeatedly that the judge had cut the legs off his planned defense. It was unfair, he said in court, for the judge to prevent him from arguing that there was nothing illegal about Stewart's Dec. 27, 2001, sale of ImClone Systems Inc. stock, so she had no reason to participate in the coverup she had been charged with. Now Morvillo and Stewart are going to find out whether the appeals courts think he was right. Within hours of being convicted Friday of conspiracy, making false statements and obstructing the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of the ImClone trade, Stewart and her former Merrill Lynch & Co. broker, Peter E. Bacanovic, said they would appeal. Stewart and Bacanovic have a difficult task, outside lawyers said. Appeals judges review most issues against the standard of whether the trial judge abused his or her discretion, a very tough benchmark to meet. The defense lawyers' best chance may be to argue that U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum's rulings violated the defendants' constitutional rights, legal analysts said. "The rules of evidence provide the judge with vast discretion in managing the evidence" that goes to a jury, said Barry Boss, a defense lawyer not involved in the case. "But you do have a Sixth Amendment and a due process right to articulate your chosen defense." An appeal, if nothing else, would probably delay the start of the defendants' prison. sentences. Experts in the federal guidelines said Stewart is likely to get about a year in prison when she is sentenced June 17, even though she faces up to 20 years. Lawyers for both defendants declined through spokesmen to comment for this article, but sources familiar with Stewart's team said Cedarbaum's decision to limit what defense lawyers could tell the jury will probably be central to her case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Cedarbaum not only refused to allow a defense expert to testify on insider-trading law, she also told Morvillo he could not argue that Stewart was being unfairly singled out for prosecution because of her celebrity. Stewart's lawyers also plan to attack the prosecution's argument that Stewart and Bacanovic's statements to investigators about what happened on Dec. 27 were false because they "concealed" the true reason for the trade. Stewart and Bacanovic told investigators that they had previously agreed that she would sell her ImClone stock if its price fell to $60 a share. According to federal investigators, both Stewart and Bacanovic said they spoke on the 27th and that she sold 3,928 shares after he told her the price had fallen below $60. But Bacanovic's former assistant Douglas Faneuil testified that he was the one who talked to Stewart and that he broke Merrill Lynch rules to tip her that ImClone founder Samuel D. Waksal and his two daughters were trying to dump their shares in the company. ImClone announced the next day that its top cancer drug Erbitux was in regulatory trouble. Waksal is in prison for insider trading. The defense teams' argument on the "concealment theory" centers on the fact that there are no official records of what questions Stewart and Bacanovic were asked by government investigators, legal analysts said. For example, if Stewart was asked, "Tell us everything that went into your decision to sell ImClone on Dec. 27," an answer that failed to mention the tip about the Waksals' trading would almost certainly qualify as concealment. But if she was asked, "What was the main reason you sold?" her answer about the $60 arrangement might not meet the legal definition of a false statement. The jury never specifically found that the $60 arrangement did not exist. The defense therefore could argue that without a written or taped record of the questions there was not enough evidence to prove that the statements were false beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge angered Bacanovic's lawyers for the way she answered the jury's question about the evidentiary rules for perjury, a charge on which Bacanovic was convicted but Stewart did not face. Cedarbaum told the panel that the written record of a Dec. 27 message from Bacanovic taken down by Stewart's assistant, Ann Armstrong, could constitute independent corroboration of Armstrong's testimony about what Bacanovic said that day. "I think we have error here, and the appeals court will determine that," Bacanovic's lawyer, Richard M. Strassberg, said in court Friday. The jurors said on the verdict form that their vote to convict Bacanovic of perjury was based solely on the fact that they believed he lied under oath about that particular phone message. Some legal analysts said Morvillo's claim that he was unfairly limited in his defense may fall short because Cedarbaum's decision prevented him only from introducing expert evidence about the state of the law. The judge said several times that she would allow him to present evidence about Stewart's state of mind to show that she thought there was nothing wrong with the trade. Stewart did not testify and the defense did not present any other evidence to that effect. "Without any evidence of what she actually thought, the appeals court may reject that argument," said Alan Vinegrad, a former U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. Both Bacanovic and Stewart are likely to argue that the most damning testimony from Stewart's best friend Mariana Pasternak -- that Stewart said, "Isn't it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?" just days after her ImClone sale -- should not have been considered by the jury. Pasternak acknowledged on cross-examination that she wasn't sure whether Stewart said those words or Pasternak herself thought them during conversation. Cedarbaum told jurors not to consider that quote in the case against Bacanovic because it did not meet the legal requirements for evidence against him, but one juror said after the trial that Pasternak's testimony was important to their overall decision. Bacanovic's lawyers were also upset during the trial that the jury was read a number of newspaper articles about the case -- ordinarily forbidden in criminal cases -- related to the securities fraud count against Stewart that Cedarbaum eventually dropped. As a result, their appeal will argue that Cedarbaum's refusal to separate his case from Stewart's jeopardized Bacanovic's right to a fair trial. © 2004 The Washington Post Company