Martha reportedly says: “I just hate these sentencing guidelines.”

Laurie Cohen has this front-page story (subscription required) on Martha Stewart’s prison experiences.  The long piece includes a lot of interesting sentencing items and some Booker discussion.  Here are a few highlights:

On a recent morning in a dining room at the federal prison camp here, Martha Stewart listened, banana in hand, as two inmates told her of the assets they had to forfeit before serving lengthy sentences. A frustrated Ms. Stewart pounded her banana on the table, an inmate recalls.  Susan C. Spry, serving a 12-year, seven-month sentence for possession of methamphetamine, says she blurted: “Martha, you’re bruising your banana!” She says Ms. Stewart responded: “I just hate these sentencing guidelines.” …

During her stay, Ms. Stewart, perhaps the nation’s most famous federal convict, has become interested in prison and sentencing reform.  After a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in January that rendered mandatory sentencing guidelines unconstitutional, she wrote that she worried her fellow inmates would sink into a “severe depression” if courts fail to grant them shorter sentences….

In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, a number of Alderson inmates have filed petitions to get their cases reconsidered.  “People were running up and down the hall cheering” on Jan. 12, the day the Supreme Court struck down the constitutionality of mandatory sentencing guidelines, says [a fellow inmate], whose own petition has been stayed.  Ms. Stewart, she says, “has passed along whatever information she found out from her lawyers and has been galvanizing in terms of encouragement and exhortation to action.”…

But as Ms. Stewart predicted, many whose spirits were raised have become depressed again as they have learned that courts are unlikely to re-open plea bargains, in which defendants are required to waive appeals.  “Most women are disappointed now,” says [another inmate], who was also a lawyer, judge and prosecutor before being sent to prison.  “And most are realistic.”