THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE:

There's a Reason Your Mother Told You Not to Lie (ALEX BERENSON, 3/076/04, NY Times)

IN the end, the case turned out to be a slam dunk.

After months of debate about whether prosecutors made Martha Stewart a target because of her fame and after an apparently serious setback to the government's case only a few days earlier, jurors on Friday convicted Ms. Stewart of four counts of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. They had begun deliberating only two days earlier.

The quick conviction may not settle the public debate over whether Ms. Stewart was treated fairly. But defense lawyers for white-collar criminal cases say the focus on Ms. Stewart's celebrity misses the point. The real lesson of the case, they say, is that it once again proves the potency of a little-known federal law that has become a crucial weapon for prosecutors.

The law, which lawyers usually call 1001, for the section of the federal code that contains it, prohibits lying to any federal agent, even by a person who is not under oath and even by a person who has committed no other crime. Ms. Stewart's case illustrates the breadth of the law, legal experts say.

Ms. Stewart was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements to F.B.I. agents and investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission who were investigating her for insider trading. (Her former broker, Peter E. Bacanovic, was convicted of four out of five counts of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.)

But Ms. Stewart was never charged with criminal insider trading, suggesting that if she had simply told investigators the truth she would not have faced criminal charges. The only counts the jury considered related to her behavior during the investigation.

"This was a classic case of the cover-up being worse than the crime," said Seth Taube, a white-collar defense lawyer at McCarter & English, a law firm in Newark. "It's an easy case to prove a lie."

The thing of it is, folks who engage in criminal behavior in the first place aren't likely to just tell the truth, are they?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 7, 2004 8:59 AM