And, I hate the be the first one to mention Nazis in a thread, but…

It seems straightforward to me that if you’re hiding jews in Nazi Germany (highly moral), and the Nazis ask if there are any jews in the house, it would be highly immoral not to lie.

Yes it’s an extreme example, but it proves your assertion false.

Do you think it’s impossible for a law, or a government agent, to be immoral? If not, why do you think it wrong to try to protect yourself, or someone you care about from being victimized by these immoral laws/agents?

Lying is not always immoral. Always telling the truth is a simplistic policy that does not track morality.

As I said before, some information is properly private. If one will be punished for trying to keep it private, then it may be proper to lie.

As for my response #1, it’s based on my understanding of current case law, including two Supreme Court decisions that ruled that the insider trading laws don’t apply to people who are not obligated to disclose, as well as further cases of the SEC violating this standard in an apparent attempt to expand the notion of insider trading. If that’s a “biased conjecture”, then what isn’t? And why is it bad?

I appreciate your honesty (See? I can do that!) about wanting her to suffer more because she has been successful (”power and privilege”). You’re right that I don’t agree with it. I’m sorry that you, and many others, seem to think “it’s a good thing”.

#2 Protecting her broker was not the right thing to do if she had to lie in order to do so. I think that your notion that some lying is good is correct. All lying is bad. If you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing then you put yourself into a position to lie. If you’re doing everything right, then there is no reason to.

You’re right about this; I do want her to suffer, although not terribly. But I do want her to reap the consequences of lying and being in a place of power and privilege while doing so. She earned her way to privilege and power and she abused it, giving people who have less than she does more reason to resent the rich and powerful.

I know that you won’t agree with my position, although I somewhat agree with yours. That’s ok. I don’t expect or want you to agree with me.

1) To avoid getting entangled in their attempts to expand the notion of “insider trading”.

2) To help protect her broker, who only tried to help her by giving information that was against Merrill Lynch policies, but also not clearly illegal according to case law.

I think many people would have done this. I don’t think every question that investigators ask deserves a truthful answer. Some information is properly private.

What did this have to do with her power and privilege? Yes, she was a friend of Waksal, but that relationship doesn’t seem to have mattered in this case (except, perhaps, that her broker had good reason to believe that Waksal wouldn’t have wanted his selling to be kept secret from Stewart; which makes his disclosure less unethical, but is in no way an indication of Stewart misusing her privileges).

Power and privilege only come into play in the minds of those who want her to suffer.

She had a broker who bent the rules to try to save her money by letting her know that Waksal was selling shares of ImClone. He violated Merrill Lynch’s policy against disclosing clients’ trading to others. So, I think it was definitely within Merrill Lynch’s prerogative to fire him.

Once she had the information, she legally used it to decide to sell her stock.

Her “crime” was lying to the investigators about why she sold her stock. She said it was because they had an understanding that she would sell when it dropped below $60/share. She may have lied to protect herself from investagation of this non-crime, or to protect her broker from legal and employment repercussions from helping her, or she may have actually had such a $60 plan (we can’t know).

I don’t see how any of this is an abuse of power and privilege. It seems clear to me that if power was abused, it was the government doing the abusing.

Your comments are representative of a lot of folks, but I’m having difficulty understanding precisely what you think that she did to “misuse power and privilege.” Would you mind expanding on that?.

The government never brought the insider trading charge to court. Instead, they used it (improperly, because she was never an “insider” of ImClone) to investigate Stewart; then used her statements on that to bring charges of a cover-up—of a crime they could never prove.

To make matters worse, juror Chappell Hartridge, after the trial, told reporters,”Maybe it’s a victory for the little guys who lose money in the market because of these kinds of transactions.” [emphasis mine]

That statement is very revealing:“…because of these kinds of transactions.” What kind of transactions was he referring to? Selling her stock on a tip from an insider from a company in which she held stock? Not only was that perfectly legal (like it or not), but that was never the task of the jury to determine. They were charged with determining whether she lied to investigators.

Clearly, this jury was more focused on sending a message than limiting their deliberations to the charges and the evidence before them.

The insider trading law is logically flawed. It is a crime for an executive to sell stock with the knowledge that some non-public information will cause it to drop. But, it is not a crime if he was planning to buy more and decides against it.

Stewart traded on information that Wyksal was selling his stock - that is not insider information, because she did not know why he was selling. Even if she did know why, she is not an ‘insider’ (she’s merely a stockholder) so it’s still not insider trading.

It’s a shame. Convicted for lying about a crime that she didn’t commit by an overzealous state. The politics of envy hard at work.

The government went after her because she’s rich and famous. Others saved a lot more, with direct inside information from Waksal. She just acted on a tip from her broker.

She wasn’t an insider. She didn’t have a fiduciary responsibility to other stockholders. The worst thing she might have done was lie to the government about something that was none of their fucking business (why she sold her stock). She probably knew, or was advised, that the SEC has long been interested in expanding the definition of “inider trading” and wanted to avoid persecution/prosecution. But, as of today, case law says that her selling her stock based on information from an insider (or an agent of an insider) is not illegal. It’s not fraud if you have no obligation to disclose.

The SEC went after her to show that they’re doing something about all of these corporate scandals people have been hearing about; and doing it to somebody rich and famous to show that nobody’s above the law.

She didn’t do anything wrong, and she’s a scapegoat.

This prosecution is wrong.