I Hope Martha's Seen Oz

In a column today on Findlaw, Mark Allenbaugh makes his guess as to what kind of sentence Martha Stewart might be facing. One of my hopes is that the obscene amount of attention heaped upon the Stewart case will lead to a greater public understanding of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Allenbaugh points out how defendants face an almost infinite number of factors that can force their sentences up but almost none that force a sentence down. While I'm not sure that Martha will get hit quite as hard as he does, it's somewhat sobering, nonetheless.