Word: stewart
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Stewart was caught in a simple lie, the evidence so compelling and her attorney's 20-minute defense testimony so curt--Martha's too smart to do this--that after five weeks of testimony, a jury of eight women and four men needed less than three days to deliberate. And much of that time was spent weighing the case against her co-defendant and former Merrill Lynch stockbroker, Peter Bacanovic. He was found guilty as well on four of five counts and almost certainly will see prison time...
...Attorney David Kelley insisted that the government was not singling out Martha Stewart for prosecution to make an example of her in an era of spectacular corporate corruption. Take him at his word. But Stewart was no ordinary Jane who traded on inside information to make a quick buck. Her tabloid celebrity, her status as a walking, talking brand name, and her role as CEO of a publicly held corporation turned what would otherwise have been a simple case into a treacherous web of legal and corporate issues. And at almost every turn, she and her advisers made the wrong...
...heart of the case was a stock tip that, the government alleged, allowed Stewart, once worth $1 billion, to net a measly $45,000. Prosecutors never filed criminal insider-trading charges, though, and Stewart handed her tormentors a comparatively easy obstruction case when, as the jury decided last week, she lied to cover up why she had sold 3,928 shares of ImClone Systems on the eve of an adverse ruling for its cancer drug Erbitux. Stewart could probably have come clean immediately and received a slap on the wrist from the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec). But by sticking...
...Stewart suffered her first visible emotional breakdown last Wednesday evening, after the case was handed to jurors, says a source close to her. She might have had an inkling of what was to come on Friday inside a crammed but quiet courtroom in lower Manhattan. The most serious charge against her, securities fraud, had been thrown out the previous week. But four counts remained--obstruction, conspiracy and two charges of making false statements. Stewart, grim-faced and dressed in her ritual uniform, a dark pantsuit, sat and showed no emotion as Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum repeated the word guilty four...
Where did Stewart go wrong? Trial lawyers say her attorney, Morvillo, took too big a risk in assuming that the government had not made its case. The defense presented a truncated case and never put Stewart or Bacanovic on the stand to offer a competing version of events. Howard Schiffman, head of securities litigation at Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky in Washington, notes that the defense's main argument--that Stewart and Bacanovic had an oral agreement to sell ImClone at a preset price--was left unsubstantiated. "What was the evidence that there was a prior conversation if they didn...