Last Friday evening and well into the weekend, the national news was dominated by the sentencing in a New York court of Martha Stewart to five months in prison plus five months of house arrest and two years of supervised parole for lying to investigators about a stock sale in 2001. Stewart says she will appeal and debate continues over whether she was unfairly singled out for prosecution or whether she broke the law and views herself as above the law.

Regardless of whether Stewart spends time in jail, evidence in the case does suggest Stewart sold her stock in ImClone Systems just before negative news became public about the company's premier drug product that send the share price sharply downward.

There was evidence that Stewart, who was a close friend of ImClone founder and CEO Samuel Waksal, had information others did not have when she sold her stock to minimize her financial loss.

The irony is that questionable stock sale reduced her loss by approximately $50,000 had she waited until later to sell, but the resulting scandal and threat of a conviction and jail time sent the value of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, the company she founded and led until recently, down more than a billion dollars.

Regardless of whether Stewart serves time in jail or not, it is to be hoped that a message has been sent that trading on inside information is illegal and will be prosecuted.

Stewart, a former stockbroker and member of the New York Stock Exchange, certainly knew the rules. But the evidence revealed in the trial suggests that Stewart is part of a culture of "virtual insiders," where everybody in a tight, high-society/CEO/investment banking star circle knows everybody else and Wall Street secrets are traded at Manhattan cocktail parties and tony beach barbecues on the Hamptons.

Policing insider trading is no doubt difficult, but for the rest of America to have faith in the equity markets, there has to be assurance that the system is fair and that the A-list crowd is not privy to information that gives them advantages when buying and selling stock that 99.9 percent of investors do not have.

By selecting to prosecute such a high-profile defendant, federal officials might succeed in broadcasting the message that improper stock trades will be discovered and prosecuted.

A similar message has been sent to corporate boards across America by the very public trials involving Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and Adelphia Cable. The message is that boards of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to represent shareholders' interests and CEOs should not be given free reign and outrageous perks by subservient boards.

Stewart is right when she notes that her actions did not hurt employees or shareholders of ImClone. She was making a distinction between the consequences of her actions and those of the tainted CEOs of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and Adlephia Cable, where investors lost many millions of dollars including retirement funds and thousands of employees lost their jobs in the wake of the scandal and resulting corporate collapses.

But the fact that Stewarts trade did not cost anyone else their life savings or their job does not change the fact it was illegal and morally wrong.

The Martha Stewart case should send a message about trading stock on privileged, insider information. But that message must be reinforced by a new determination by federal regulators and others to keep the heat on to maximize fairness in the equity markets.