Convicting the Wrong CEO; The Martha case is a distraction from Wall Street's real crimes.

Byline: Allan Sloan, Sloan is NEWSWEEK's Wall Street editor.

I'm not a Martha Stewart fan. I am congenitally unstylish, and I've spent my career trying to help ordinary people get a fair shake from the connected: the people like Stewart.

But the Stewart case creeps me out. First, I don't consider Stewart's real misdeeds--stupidity and greed and cluelessness--to be criminal offenses. Second, the Stewart case is trivial compared with Enron and WorldCom and Global Crossing and Adelphia, which have done huge damage. Thousands of people lost their jobs and lifetime savings; entire communities were so damaged, they may never recover because of serious corporate misbehavior.

Stewart's trial wasn't about corporate misbehavior. It was about misleading the government, which was investigating the home-decorating diva for a crime--insider trading--that she was never charged with. If Stewart weren't a big name, who'd care about this stuff? When a cop pulls you over for going 70 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone and you say you didn't know how fast you were going although you damn well did, you're lying to an investigating officer. If you take $520 of charitable deductions but can document only $500 of them, you're misleading the government. If the government puts your life under a microscope, do you think it won't find something? Tomorrow, my friend, it could be your turn in the barrel.

The rationale for prosecuting a cover-up when there wasn't any crime is that Martha's conviction will convince other CEOs to be more forthright. But the lesson a thinking person draws is that when the government asks questions, don't say a word. Had Stewart kept her mouth ...