[jyl]

I don't consider her crime so terribly serious. But if Martha has to do more jail time than she might really deserve, to help set an example for corporate executives, then so be it. The amount of harm that's been inflicted on millions of people by the greed, arrogance, and corruption of corporate managements - think Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, and many smaller examples - is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's just those particular stocks, not counting the harm to the overall market. That's ordinary people who lost a significant part of their assets, retirees who now have to be WalMart greeters, or others who are now going to be on thinner rations in their old age. And meanwhile a lot of CEOs and other top executives paid themselves enormous sums in salary, bonus, and options in return for lousy performance, often concealed with accounting games. As in, more in one year than many of us will earn in a lifetime. Not half enough of them have gone to jail - I'd like to see about a hundred Marthas before the feds lay off.