U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in Manhattan formally administered the sentence on Stamford, Conn., company SAC Capital and three related entities based on pleas last fall by the companies to wire fraud and securities fraud.
"Based on his plea, this mad hatter will no longer be attending any tea parties," said the Morris County prosecutor, Robert Bianchi.
The entire system is based on the plea bargain the exchange of evidence for immunity or a reduced sentence and is notoriously subject to abuse.
His lawyer, Thomas R. Ashley, said that based on the plea agreement with federal prosecutors, "we would expect a sentence in the range of 18 to 24 months," but the judge is not bound by that.
Much of the hearing, which lasted nearly two and a half hours, was devoted to arguments over which sentencing guidelines, if any, the judge should follow, or whether sentencing should be based on the plea agreement already reached.
The colonel, Yury Budanov, had appealed the sentence, which followed an earlier acquittal based on his plea of insanity at the time of the killing of the 18-year-old woman, Elsa Kungayeva, in March 2000.
But if Graham had decided to testify that he never set his athletes up with drugs, Jones, based on her plea agreement with federal authorities, would have provided a contradictory story.
The Judicial Conference committee asserts that "any member of the public who reviews the docket would be unable to determine, based on the plea agreement, whether a given defendant has cooperated".
The inmate, Earthy Daniels, argued that two earlier robbery convictions were based on guilty pleas that were not fully informed and voluntary, and that one conviction was also the product of ineffective counsel.
Legal experts said it was rare for juries to acquit defendants based on insanity pleas, and even rarer in cases where the defense claims brainwashing.
