Martha Stewart, a well-known household name, became known as a white-collar criminal after the sale of ImClone stock based on inside information. Her felony indictment consisted of charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and securities fraud. All charges are considered white-collar crimes since they do not involve violence. Ms. Stewart received information that the founder and his daughter were selling their stocks in ImClone, and with this information also sold her stock in the company. Upon questioning Ms. Stewart lied and tried to cover up knowing the inside information. She contended that she had put a preset amount in place and if the stocks were to fall below that figure she wanted to sell. She repeated this statement to many government agencies such as the Department of Justice, FBI and the S.E.C. (Hays, para. 17).
According to Constance Hay, in her New York Times article titled “Prosecuting Martha Stewart: The Overview”, Mr. Comey, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, stated that he “used ‘my discretion’ in deciding not to bring insider trading charges against Ms. Stewart and her broker. He said case law would support such charges, but he called them ‘unprecedented’”…show more content… Stewart plead not guilty to all charges and continued to profess her innocence. There were other involved such as her stockbroker and his assistant who were the ones that actually told Ms. Stewart about the founder of the company selling his stock. They were also brought up on an array of charges. Ms. Stewart’s stockbroker, Peter Bacanovic and Ms. Stewart came up with a plan to cover up the inside knowledge with the story about the preset sale price. Unfortunately, Mr. Bacanovic did not use the same blue pen in to make the additions to the document for their new story that he used when the original document was written. This made the document stand out and look suspicious and therefore was used against their claim of a preset price (Hay, para.
