Stewart jury on break till Monday
By Erin McClam
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Martha Stewart's lawyers rested their case yesterday without putting the celebrity domestic maven on the stand, calling a single witness during a defense that lasted less than an hour.
The judge excused jurors for the week and scheduled closing arguments for Monday and Tuesday, with deliberations to begin Wednesday.
The lone defense witness was Steven Pearl, a lawyer who testified about notes he took during a February 2002 interview in which the government claims Stewart told a series of lies about the day she sold her stock in ImClone Systems.
The session is an important part of the government's case, and the defense sought to use Pearl's testimony to raise questions about what Stewart was asked during the questioning — her first interview with investigators.
One accusation is that Stewart falsely claimed she did not know whether there was a record that stockbroker Peter Bacanovic had left her a message on Dec. 27, 2001, the day she sold the ImClone stock.
But Pearl's scribbled notes show Stewart may have been responding instead to a question about what time Bacanovic called her that day.
Under cross-examination by prosecutors, Pearl acknowledged that his notes were incomplete. He also admitted there may have been a question about the message log that he did not write down.
Referring to his notes and a memo he prepared after the interview, Pearl said: "Neither one is a verbatim transcript."
There was no court reporter or tape recorder in the interview. To charge Stewart with lying, the government relied on the notes of an FBI agent who was present.
Lawyers for co-defendant Bacanovic also rested their case yesterday. They called five witnesses over three days.
The government claims Stewart sold her 3,928 ImClone shares because she was tipped that ImClone CEO Sam Waksal was frantically trying to unload his own stake. A negative report about an ImClone cancer drug soon sent the stock tumbling.
Stewart and Bacanovic claim that before Stewart sold, they had made a plan to get rid of the shares if ImClone's stock price fell below $60. Prosecutors say it was simply a cover story.
Jurors were excused for the week after prosecutors introduced one final piece of evidence — a portion of Bacanovic's interview with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
On the audiotape, jurors heard Bacanovic say he never discussed the $60 arrangement with Heidi DeLuca, a Stewart business manager. "I never get into that level of detail with Heidi," Bacanovic says on the tape.
That appeared to refute testimony DeLuca gave earlier this week, in which she said Bacanovic discussed with her a plan to sell Stewart's ImClone shares when they fell to $61 or $60.
Prosecutors have suggested Bacanovic was talking about ImClone shares that Stewart held in a company pension account — not her personal shares.
U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum has yet to rule on motions from both defendants urging her to dismiss the charges in the case. She has indicated it is unlikely that she will throw out all charges.
The judge has focused some of her attention on whether she should dismiss the securities-fraud charge against Stewart — which carries more prison time than any other charge in the case.
That count accuses Stewart of deceiving investors in her own company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, by claiming in 2002 that she sold ImClone stock because of the $60-threshold agreement.
