As Caricci pointed out, Martha, because she is only being punished for having the temerity to be a successful woman. With everything that happened with Enron etc., and this one woman is getting all the media hate. There’s a definite tinge of “serves her right, the uppity bitch” from that quarter.
Dahmer is interesting, but I have no sympathy. There are other people who had traumatic and destructive childhoods who found a better path.
Best quote so far.
Martha may not have come out and said she was sorry but she asked to get her sentence out of the way instead of dragging it out and waiting on the appeal process. I think that’s as good a repentent Martha Stewart as your going to get and I think it took some balls to say the hell with the appeals and the waiting let’s just get it over with.
I agree with those who say her punishment doesn’t fit her crime. She could do more for the community by being required to do community service of some sort then vegetating in a prison making uniforms for other prisoners (at least they’ll be stylish).
Also, who of us would have sat on a stock tip and lost money? Now how many of us would have lured young men into our homes then killed and eaten them? Hmm?
I have to say I have more sympathy for Martha. A cannibalistic serial killer gets absolutely no sympathy. Yes, something terrible may have happened to make him what he was, however lots of people have terrible things happen to them and they don’t all turn into cannibalistic murderers. I think it’s unfortunate that he ended up that way but that does not generate any sympathy - that all goes to the victims and their families.
Martha Stewart -“At least I don’t eat people. It’s a good thing.”
Interesting to see how many people have more sympathy for Dahmer than Martha. Wonder if that’s partially the band-aid of time covering up the wounds Dahmer caused.
If I had to chose, Martha would get more sympathy than Jeffrey. No one died, no one was seriously injured, and no one was cheated out of their life savings.
So she’s not repentant, so what? She’s not required to be. She’s lost control of her company, she’s now a convicted felon, and she’s humiliated before the world.
What more would being sorry really get her? Who’d believe her anyway? We’d all say it was a calculated plea to reduce her sentence.
But she did not serve up her guests as finger food.
And I love this line:
Good point. Also did anyone take the time to understand why Marta is in jail? She is in jail for lying during an investigation which turned up nothing. Not only was she not convicted, she was never indicted. On top of that, if she held on to the stock she dumped she would have made more money. Those poor little investors that were not able to sell the stock at a profit made more money than Martha did by dumping it. (She dumped it at $60. I think sometime later it went up above $80. I think it has since gone back down again below $60. Someone who follows the market can get better info. If she had good insider info she would have held on till the $80 mark.)
So on one hand you have someone who is jailed for lying about something that couldn’t be proved to be illegal and lost money on the deal. She then lost millions due to the negative press coverage and publicity.
On the other hand you have a serial killer/cannibal.
Hummm who would I have more sympathy for…
I’m not so sure we should be in a hurry to jump on the gender bandwagon here. . . Sam Waksal got seven years, and Stewart’s co-defendant, Peter Bacanovic, got the same sentence she did. Douglas Faneuil got off with a fine, but he was charged with lesser offenses, and in addition provided testimony against Steward and Bacanovic.
My sympathy goes to Martha, for the many reasons that were already given by others.
I’m appalled that anyone has any sympathy for Dahmer. He “cooperated fully with the authorities once he was found out”? How very convenient. Perhaps he could have “cooperated” at a more opportune time, like when that one young man managed to escape and pleaded with the police to help him, who then returned him to a his torture chamber. If he was so remorseful, that would have been a good time to admit what he was doing and get help.
Dahmer did what he did because he was insane. Stewart did what she did because she was greedy. She didn’t even need the money. It was nothing more than pocket change to her. Big difference.
While it’s unquestionably true that Dahmer’s actions were horrific, and Stewart didn’t directly hurt anyone (although she and her co-criminals harmed the public’s faith in our financial markets), it’s hard to argue that someone like Dahmer can considered to be truly responsible for his actions (I know he was found to be legally sane enough to be tried, but it’s beyond question that he was absolutely nuts, and driven by compulsions that the rest of us can’t begin to understand).
It’s also quite likely true that Dahmer was knowingly allowed to be murdered by the authorities while he was in prison, much as John Geoghan was in Massachusetts. I simply can’t believe that whoever was running whatever correctional facility housed Dahmer didn’t know the risks of putting him in the general population. So Dahmer’s murder was, to some extent, the result of an extra-judicial death sentence. Being opposed to the death penalty in all cases (that can arise in a developed society), that scores him a few points on my sympathy meter.
Those two seem to be a bit at odds.
Why do you think he was nuts and driven by compulsions? Because he did things that were really really gross? That would make pretty much all mutilating murderers driven by compulsions. I for one believe some people murder other people because they like doing it. Not because they’re crazy.
Maybe Martha was driven by compulsions to make more money.
The only time I can remember laughing at anything Victoria Jackson said or did on SNL was when she was an editorialist on a Weekend Update segment about prison violence the week after Dahmer’s murder. After an impassioned plea about how just because they are incarcerated doesn’t mean they aren’t people she asks the audience “Just how many Jeffrey Dahmers are going to have to die before we say we’re mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore?”
I’m afraid I’m in the “I don’t care if he was raised by Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby and a pack of rabid dingos, he needed killin’.”
I think he was nuts and driven by compulsions because his actions speak for themselves. We all have our quirks, but his were a bit outside the pale of sanity.
We’re all capable of getting a bit greedy, like Ms. Stewart, but because we’re sane, we don’t steal (or otherwise violate applicable law or SEC regulations). And because we’re sane, the law holds us responsible. Because we’re not compelled to steal (except in cases of dire need), we’re expected to keep our greed in check, or at least channel it into acceptable areas (like, say, Warren Buffet).
While wanting the property of others is sort of built into human nature (just watch kids playing sometime), wanting to create brain-dead zombies for one’s sexual pleasure is not. The desire, in and of itself, is pretty good evidence that something is seriously wrong with the person having the desire.
My thoughts exactly - like comparing apples and monkey wrenches. I opened this thread thinking “they can’t really mean…can they?”
As I posted above, the gender thing is a straw man in this case. The men involved in the case received, in one case (Peter Bacanovic), exactly the same sentence as did Ms. Stewart, and in another, a sentence that is approximately seventeen times that meted out to Ms. Stewart (granted, Sam Waksal was the ringleader, and stood to gain more by his crimes).
As to the media hysteria, Ms. Stewart, over her career, has intentionally made herself into a public figure. The media hysteria is a direct result of her own desire to be in the public eye.
And her crime may indeed have been motivated by fear, but it was fear of getting caught, not fear for life or limb.
Not really. There’s a world of difference between legal insanity and being bat-shit nuts. I’m neither a lawyer nor a psychiatrist, but perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I could clarify this here.
Where did you hear the far-out hijack that Manson “never even killed anyone?” The only place i could think of would be at a Free Mumia charity benefit concert.
I’ll concede the fact Leslie Van Houten probably didn’t ‘kill anyone’ (she’s alleged to have only stabbed Rosemary LaBianca post-mortem). As far as Manson goes:
As far as where I’d place my sympathies - definitely more with proverbially jaywalking Martha than a perverted cannibal who finally got the justice he deserved in the big house.
I don’t really like this line of thinking. We shouldn’t think it’s “[getting] the justice he deserved” when a killer is murdered in prison. It’s murder, plain and simple. We haven’t made the status of the victim a justification for murder yet in this country (I know that people will point out that in fact, we have done exactly that in the past, but that’s a perversion of the law rather than the law itself).
Dahmer’s murder in prison had nothing to do with justice. He was murdered. It’s entirely possible that he was set up to be murdered by the authorities responsible for his custody.
Dahmer’s sentence had everything to do with justice. He deserved to be punished for his crimes. It was necessary to segregate him from society, because it was certainly likely that he’d repeat his crimes.
But he wasn’t sentenced to death.
I take this to mean the person should die in the opinion of the speaker even though a court decided s/he should serve life.
Well, right. Not in my opinion, but in that of the quoted poster, I guess. And it’s not just the court’s opinion that Dahmer should have received a life sentence. It’s the will of the people of the state in which he committed his crimes, as expressed and codified by their state legislature and implemented by the courts of that state.