Martha Stewart deserves to be in prison. We all know why.

     She sold something she owned. Expecting the stock she was holding to tumble, she unloaded it. Everybody knows that if you look out for your own interest in an economic transaction, you should be thrown in jail. Especially if your decision is an informed one. That is why late-night comedians have been laughing it up at Stewart's expense, with the incessant punch lines about the shivs and the doilies.

     Of course, the government can't go after everybody at once, so you and I are still on the loose. But also of course, Martha Stewart was a particularly tantalizing target even before she sold something she owned and possibly fibbed to the feds about it, though not under oath, which means there was no perjury, though it should be crime anyway, because lying is bad. Guilty? Yes. She is rich, famous, better at setting the table than us, and rumored to have spoken sharply to subordinates.

     Perhaps you protest that Martha Stewart is innocent of any actual wrongdoing, certainly not of violating anybody's rights. Perhaps you say that she did not steal from anybody; that she acquired her ImClone shares honestly; that when she sold the shares, it was not by pointing a gun at somebody's temple but peacefully, through a broker. I suppose you also contend that neither does former ImClone exec Sam Waksal deserve to be incarcerated for telling family members to sell ImClone stock when he learned the Food and Drug Administration would soon issue a negative report about ImClone's cancer drug. Perhaps you believe that, at worst, stockholders might have a case of breach of contract, if contractual terms bar company officers from talking to family members about the firm's ups and downs; and that it was no such lawsuit pertaining to breach of contract which landed Waksal in jail. You're probably also stressing that nobody, in any case, should be buying stock unless he knows that stock prices can gyrate.

     Is that it? That all you got? Pitiful.

     Compare selling something you own with murder. Mumia Abu-Jamal is on death row, still, for a murder he committed in 1982. Mumia is the darling of some left-wingers, including sundry celebrities, for saying politically correct things. Ergo he must not have killed 25-year-old Danny Faulkner within minutes after Faulkner radioed for backup. Of course, witnesses identified Mumia, who was still on the scene when the backup arrived, as the killer. And bullets from his gun had somehow ended up in the dead guy. Mumia survived his own wound from the one shot his victim had been able to get off.

     In prison this former Black Panther has been writing searing manifestos, like Live from Death Row. It includes the following compelling words about McCleskey v. Kemp, a Supreme Court decision supportive of the death penalty: "The majority's perambulations to its eventual rejection of that which it could hardly deny – that the race of the victim is a primary factor in determining whether a defendant lives or dies – proved the potency of the old adage offered by the satirical character Mr. Dooley, who shrewdly observed: 'No matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns.'" Mm.

     Now, I know that some pesky readers are going to ask whether the defendants' role in killing their victims might also have much to do with their fates. I know other readers are going to say that even if one opposes the death penalty, that doesn't make Mumia innocent.

     Mumia's writing has its fans, some of whom applaud his work at the Amazon web site. "To me, anytime that a reader can feel the emotion of a story, the writer has achieved a point." "Mumia is an eloquent writer and I felt his innocence in his words." "The main thing this book did was change my views on capital punishment at first I was all for it but those views changed I am now against it...free Mumia!!!" "It makes you think, without being complicated. Mumia was once a Black Panther journalist, so he knows how to write...." "This book is and was probably one of the most inspirating [sic] books I have ever read." "Mumia's book is not a selfish effort to save himself from execution. Rather, he is the voice of the voiceless who speaks on countless issues, from police brutality to the environment, the prison system to the criminalization of youth."

     What a strange world we live in, in which some people simultaneously believe it is wrong to free a convicted killer despite the killer's uncomplicated mastery of politically correct lingo, yet A-OK to sell something you own.