I’m glad you brought up what you did.

I believe what Sihpol did was very unethical and very immoral. In a society and business environment where people were constrained by commonly-held Judeo-Christian beliefs, Sihpol and the others would not have done what they did.

That said, a jury of Sihpol’s peers essentially found that the laws Spitzer wanted to apply to this situation didn’t apply. If the laws aren’t up to the task, we’ll just have to go through the messy process of passing new laws. Spitzer’s methods are a lazy way of getting around all those messy details and hard work.

Maybe the prosecutor was dumb, bungled the case, and put the judge to sleep, but, in spite of the fact that I have personally been harmed by the crazy jury system, I prefer it to the trial-by-press-release methods of Spitzer. I think a lot of people who would never be convicted by a jury are being intimidated by Spitzer into saying “no mas.” That is not justice.

I don’t think Spitzer believed that Sihpol would resist. Sihpol had to sue just to get BofA to pay his legal fees. Even after that, I think Spitzer was trying to get a guilty verdict on Sihpol to use as a hammer to force the others to settle. Now, in my opinion, he’s desperate.

First, Mr. Sihpol is not the only person to face trial regarding late trading and improper fund trading. There are three more individuals whose trial is set to begin in September. In addition, one mutual fund executive pled guilty and served a jail term. A second broker-dealer executive pled guilty yesterday to late trading charges and another pled guilty nearly two years ago.

In addition, William Galvin’s office in Massachusetts is considering bringing criminal charges against three Prudential brokers in Boston.

So Sihpol is not alone.

Yet, outragously, Paul Schectman (Sihpol’s lead lawyer) asked the jury during his closing argument why those at Security Trust (another late trading firm) had not faced trial as part of his effort to undermine the prosecution’s case. What he left out was that two Security Trust executives are among those who will be tried in September. No one else had faced trial simply because someone has to be first.

That said, the scheme perpetrated by Canary Capital and Edward Stern to my mind, was clearly fraudalent. However, Eliot Spitzer backed himself into a corner when he cut a deal with Stern and then found that he had few other targets to go after. Rather than being a small fish leading to bigger fish, Stern appears to have been a whale himself and that whale has swum free.

That miscalculation left Sihpol as one of the only fish in the net that could be tried.

Should Sihpol be tried again? Imagine someone being allowed to buy a stock at 5 pm at the closing price. What seller would agree to that trade? Then imagine that the broker told the seller the sale order had gone through at 4 pm, not 5 pm. Is this a fraud? Was something of worth taken through deception? It seems so to me. That is what the Sihpol case is about.

In as far as he participated in a scheme that enabled Stern & Co to steal from hundreds of thousands of investors, I believe it would be a good thing for all of us for him to be convicted. For that to happen, though, the prosecutors will have to do a much better job than they did the first time.

The problem in the first trial was that Harold Wilson, the prosecutor, utterly failed in his presentation of the case. He literally put the jury to sleep. One juror told me after the case that even Judge Yates appeared asleep at one point.

Yates also was unsure of how the Sihpol/Canary plot worked and said so in a sidebar.

Wilson also never underlined the harm caused by Sihpol’s actions.

So, perhaps Spitzer should change his team, but we should think carefully before asking him to not pursue justice.