If you can bear three more words about the year's most celebrated trial, allow this law-and-order conservative to utter them in hopes of igniting a national movement: Free Martha Stewart.

The doyenne of domestic sciences hasn't been jailed yet, of course; if I were the judge she never would be. The purposes of justice would be better served if she were allowed to return to work and rebuild her company.

This would also better serve the nation's aesthetics -- justice outranks beauty in society's list of priorities, but not by much.

And there's the nation's humor industry to consider as well. If it weren't for the occasional parody of her television show, "Saturday Night Live" might as well go off the air. What would we do without "Martha Stewart's Topless Christmas Special," in which she, wearing nothing but trousers and boots, strides through the woods with a couple of lumberjacks in search of the perfect tree?

Or the spoof in which she attempts a holiday meal with her mom but finishes with a glass in her hand and says, "Jack Daniels -- it's a good thing"?

No other female icon of late 20th-century America has spawned as many doctoral dissertations and scholarly essays as Martha Stewart has -- except Madonna -- and Martha is the one with good taste. She, more than any other person, delivered America's vast middle class from the tackiness of the '70s and the excess of the '80s.

Martha taught most of us about thread counts and then made decent bedsheets available at Kmart. Target wouldn't offer designer domestics at discount prices if Martha hadn't blazed that retail trail first.

Her vast success -- cultural and financial, metaphorical and measurable -- is what makes her a wildly inappropriate scapegoat for our current corporate follies. Martha Stewart is no Dennis Kozlowski or Kenneth Lay; her company is no Tyco or Enron. She actually created something.

Her ascent began in the post-feminist 1980s, when women who did not disdain the domestic arts hungered for a role model to give their culturally despised life's work a new stature and grace. Martha brought the corporate world to the kitchen and the craft table. She created consumers for myriad products and industries that, two decades ago, barely existed.

Her contribution to the economy is real. It outweighs the real harm she's done.

The administration of justice includes four objectives: punishment, deterrence, restitution and rehabilitation.

Since her crimes were committed to protect a $200,000 investment, her loss of more than $400 million is punishment enough.

Deterrence? I doubt it's possible. America's corporate bigwigs seem never to tire of inventing ways to pick retirees' pockets.

Martha Stewart Multimedia shareholders' best hope for getting their money back is to put the company's founder back to work building her brand. Such restitution now, or after the shareholders' civil lawsuit, may be a tangential way to address the issues of punishment and deterrence, since nothing hurts the greedy like garnisheeing their salaries.

And rehabilitation? Martha Stewart, the princess of perfection, needs to know that we know she's not perfect and appreciate her anyway.

In spite of those who were gleeful over her downfall, she deserves a second chance. Doing penance -- it's a good thing.