Looking over the Martha Stewart case, which ended in a guilty verdict March 5, you’d expect to find someone to feel sorry for: Stewart herself, perhaps, paying a big price for a single stumble; or maybe the shareholders she victimized.

But this was an odd case from the start, and it’s hard to find the wronged party. Let’s look at the candidates one by one.

Martha Stewart

First, there’s Stewart, who might well be viewed as a victim of prosecutorial overkill. While news accounts now name her alongside the great corporate wrongdoers of the day, she’s really not in the same league as executives from Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and Adelphia.

In most of those cases, executives are accused of intentionally defrauding their own shareholders. They used phony accounting to pump up their share price for personal gain, or they squandered shareholders’ money on their own lavish lifestyles. In each case, the victims — shareholders — lost hundreds of millions, sometimes billions.

By comparison, Stewart’s crime was penny ante. Acting on an inside tip from her broker, she dumped about 4,000 shares of biotech company ImClone Systems the day before the world learned the company’s experimental cancer drug was in regulatory trouble. With the sale, Stewart avoided a loss of about $50,000 when the news drove down ImClone’s share price the next day.

But hers was not a long-running, premeditated scheme like those of the other corporate crooks; it started with a moment of bad judgment, for which many people would forgive her.

The crimes she was convicted of involved the aftermath — the cover-up. And this is where she loses the sympathy vote. She shouldn’t have lied to investigators, or compounded the offense by refusing for more than two years to tell the truth.

So Martha Stewart has lost her reputation and lots of money, and she’ll probably spend some time behind bars. She deserves all that.

ImClone investors

Next, there are the investors who bought Stewart’s ImClone shares. They paid $58.43 a share and watched the price fall to $45.39 when trading resumed several days later, after the company announced its drug was in trouble.

Stewart had advance knowledge of that bad news, and these traders were at a distinct disadvantage because they didn’t. The 22 percent loss that should have been Stewart’s became theirs. It’s as if you sold someone a used car without telling them the transmission was shot.

The principle of fair play is important, else people wouldn’t buy stocks and our economic system would grind to a halt. Everybody is supposed to have access to the same information. The winners ought to be those who work hardest to understand it and have the best judgment, not just those, such as Stewart, with friends in the right places.

But let’s face it: Stewart didn’t contact these investors and urge them to buy the shares; the buyers went to the market on their own seeking shares at that price. If they hadn’t bought them from her, they might well have bought them at the same price from someone else who didn’t have inside information — a completely legitimate trade.

We don’t know what those investors did with the ImClone shares they got from Stewart, so we don’t know how much they might have lost. By late September 2002 the stock had fallen to below $7, but it has since recovered to near $48. And the cancer drug now has been approved by regulators.

Although these investors were cheated — technically — they did choose to invest in a risky stock, probably would have bought it even if Stewart wasn’t selling and could have profited handsomely if they’d bought more as the shares bottomed out.

So it’s hard to work up much sympathy for these investors — certainly not as we would for the thousands of Enron employees who lost their jobs and retirement investments.

Omnimedia investors

Then there are the current shareholders in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. After her guilty verdict was announced, the shares fell 22 percent. They were off again Monday.

But I’m not shedding tears for these folks, either. After all, Stewart’s problems with ImClone hit the news on June 6, 2002, so shareholders had 21 months to get out. The broad market has done well in that period.

Those who didn’t get out chose to take a big risk. Clearly, much of the stock’s value was tied to Stewart’s reputation. Even if she hadn’t mired the company in scandal, she could have succumbed to any ordinary fate — illness or death.

So we come to the final candidates for sympathy — people who owned the Omnimedia stock on June 6, 2002, when the shares closed at $19.01. When a news story that day said Stewart had sold her ImClone shares prior to the bad news the previous December, Stewart put out a statement that she’d sold because of a pre-existing agreement with her broker to sell if the share price fell to $60.

That, and many similar statements afterward, were lies.

At the close of trading the next day, June 7, shares in Omnimedia had fallen 8.5 percent. By the end of June, they were down 40 percent.

But I wouldn’t worry too much about losses investors suffered after June 7, when they could have bailed out and limited their loss to 8.5 percent. Investors who held on, or bought the shares after the first indications of scandal, chose a big risk.

The great irony in the Stewart case is that the victims who suffered most — those June 6, 2002, shareholders — got no justice. Prosecutors had charged Stewart with fraud for falsely claiming innocence to prop up her company’s share price. But the judge dismissed that charge during the trial, finding insufficient evidence Stewart intended to defraud her shareholders.

What a shame. By any reasonable standard, she let down the people who trusted her most.

It ought to be a crime.