Martha Stewart made the same mistake Richard Nixon made: lying about what she did has gotten her into far more trouble than what she was lying about ever would have on its own.

And she is a living example of how karma works. Her alleged nastiness toward a wide variety of people throughout her adult life has come back to bite her. If she didn't have a longstanding reputation as a mean, nasty person, I think things would have gone much better for her.

But her lawyer seems like a complete incompetent. Why didn't he tell her that wearing expensive fur wraps to court (like she did the day she was convicted) just wouldn't strike the right tone?

Having said all of this, I think that sending her to prison would be wrong, very wrong. She should get probation and a hefty fine (of course she has already lost millions and millions of dollars because of this). She should also be barred from sitting on the board or being on the payroll of any publicly traded company forevermore. But sending a 65 year old woman with no criminal record to prison for something like this would be excessively cruel and pointless.

I started my new job this week as a new media producer with the top-rated TV station in our area. So far, so good. I like it a lot.

I knew Brenda Blanton Lane, the victim whose murderer has been on Tennessee's death row for fifteen years but who now has an execution date set. Brenda was a talented, gentle, quiet, and kind young woman who worked as a reporter at The Shelbyville Times Gazette when my mother was the editor there.

Brenda was abuducted from a parking lot by a crazy man, who stabbed her repeatedly with a butcher knife, ran over with his car, and left her to die in a remote middle Tennessee location on a freezing winter day. I was a teenager when Brenda was killed and her murder affected me very deeply and was hard on my mother, who was very fond of Brenda.

Today my mother is the media relations spokesperson for the Tennessee Supreme Court and as such, she is charged with handling all of the public communications regarding Brenda's murderer's pending execution. It's a really sad irony and lately I have been thinking unimaginable it would have been to Brenda and my mom that one day Brenda would be long dead at the hands of a murderer and that my mother would have to discuss it with the press on a weekly basis.

So sad.