MOUNT DESERT – Kathy Ferland thinks Martha Stewart got a bad deal. So does David Hyde. And Perry Bradley.

They all think the government used the part-time Maine resident as an example of what could happen to business leaders who behave badly.

They think if Stewart were a Mark instead of a Martha, she would be vacationing at her Mount Desert mansion, Skylands, overlooking Somes Sound instead of pleading for mercy in a New York City courthouse.

“I think she got railroaded,” said lobsterman David Hyde, who has been fishing in the Sound for most of his 70-plus years. “There are two other words I could use. One is ‘screwed’ and the other one you can probably figure out.”

Kathy Ferland didn’t have much to say about Stewart’s fate except to echo a common theme: that America’s most famous homebody didn’t do anything different from what thousands of other investors would do if they could, and she therefore was just unlucky to get caught.

But Ferland did have something to say about the Martha Stewart who supported the Somesville Library fund-raiser a couple of years ago by bringing 10 of her guests to the village fire station to eat blueberry pancakes off paper plates.

And the Stewart who loves the steamed clams at Abel’s Lobster Pound – and never gets anything but the clams – and where she also brings groups of friends for a classic Down East dinner.

“My personal opinion of her was that she was a good steward of [Mount Desert Island] to bring her friends here and spend her money here,” said Ferland, who, like so many MDI residents, depends on the jobs created by summer dwellers and visitors to afford living on MDI year-round.

Ellsworth house painter David Lee, who has worked at Stewart’s Seal Harbor summer home, looked stunned to hear she was sentenced to jail.

“I don’t think she should get anything,” Lee said after pumping gas at Somesville One Stop. “She shouldn’t go to a federal prison.”

Bruce Cassidy of Freeport, sailing in the Sound with a yacht club, said Stewart should just go directly to jail and get it over with as soon as possible.

“She should show up at the door tomorrow and get rid of [the sentence] and save herself $5 million” in additional legal fees, Cassidy said.

The club members from midcoast Maine had varying opinions about Stewart from “snotty” to “an inspiration to women,” but they all agreed Stewart was used as an example because of her celebrity and power.

Many of them agreed that countless other people, men in particular, would not have been prosecuted.

“She should have gotten a $1 million fine, a slap on the wrist and then say goodbye,” said Perry Bradley of Freeport. “Putting her in jail for five months. What good does that do?”

Even people who didn’t necessarily think Stewart was a nice person didn’t think she should go to jail.

There were others, though, unwilling to forgive Stewart’s greediness and guilt and still others who thought she got off easy with a five-month jail sentence and another five months under house arrest.

“She gets to go to a spa for five months?” asked one woman selling tickets at the Northeast Harbor marina. “How sad.”