Franceso Colorado Cessa, his son Francisco Jr., and a business associate, Ramon Segura Flores, are accused of conspiring to offer a $1.2 million bribe to Judge Sam Sparks in an attempt to get a lenient sentence for the elder Mr. Colorado Cessa in the money laundering case.
If this was indeed vigilante justice, the men may have been upset at how long the case is taking to work its way through the courts or Suter's being granted bail or the men could be assuming that he'll get a lenient sentence and are preemptively punishing him.
On Aug. 10 he got a more lenient sentence than the government had sought, stiffer than the defense had desired.
Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Rutgers University whose research focuses on voter fraud accusations, said it didn't make sense that Casey got a significantly more lenient sentence when he was the only one of the three people who benefited from fraud.
Defense lawyers argued that Mrs. Myers should get a more lenient sentence partly because of poor health.
With biting questions, Mr. Vinegrad suggested that Mr. Volpe was lying to help another former officer and to get a more lenient sentence.
"I didn't feel at all guilty about what I did, so I couldn't plead guilty, even though I would get a more lenient sentence," she says.
If Madoff, 70, gets a relatively lenient 20 years and lives beyond the age of 87, he could conceivably see daylight again.
Echoing the "stop snitchin' " campaign among some hip-hop fans and artists, however, Jay-Z hastened to dissociate himself from Mr. Lucas's decision to cooperate with the authorities to get a more lenient sentence.
Kadyrbayev has not testified at either trial; Tazhayakov, who, after he was convicted, agreed to testify against Phillipos in the hopes of getting a more lenient sentence, said that the language spoken was English, but the defense marshalled a series of witnesses who said that, as a rule, the two Kazakh men spoke Russian to each other.
