Stewart's Grounds for Appeal

Martha Stewart's attorneys think they have grounds for an appeal:

Martha Stewart's lead attorney Robert Morvillo intends to appeal her conviction by arguing the judge unfairly prevented him from explaining to the jury Stewart had not been charged with criminal insider trading, according to a person close to the defense team.

"We think that was important," a person knowledgeable with the strategy told CNNfn. "Some of the jury comments afterwards indicated they felt they were punishing her for the trade. We should have been able to explain you're not being asked to judge the propriety of the trade."

The article suggests that this is unlikely to succeed, though it does probe at some of the questions I was considering yesterday. I think it pretty clear that one of the large motivations for this prosecution of Stewart on lesser, collateral crimes is that the prosecutors truly believe she is guilty of the larger, underlying illegality. After all, they are bringing a civil suit where they don't have to meet the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard:

While Stewart was never charged with criminal insider trading for her sale of ImClone, she is facing a civil lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that her sale of ImClone was an illegal inside trade.

What is more worrisome is the idea that the jury has convicted her of the collateral crime in some part because they are convinced she was actually guilty of some other crimes. To the extent that Stewart's attorney was not allowed to defend against the prosecution's innuendo to that effect, I think there has been some injustice. Probably not enough to overturn her conviction, but just another difficult aspect to a case already difficult to reconcile with my competing intuitions.