Ms. Moody-Barksdale was arrested on Wednesday along with the four other principal defendants, officials said.
Yet in the increasingly Kafkaesque lottery of Egyptian justice, the harsh sentences are sadly by no means unusual.The arrest of the three principal defendants last December and their lengthy trial contained strong elements of farce.
Two principal defendants, Mr. Rajaratnam and a former employee of New Castle Funds, Danielle Chiesi, have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges and vowed to go to trial, which is scheduled for Oct. 25.
A further 14 defendants, half of them students whose relation to the case was never made clear, the rest employees of Al Jazeera who no longer live in Egypt, were lumped together with the principal defendants.
When the five principal defendants managed to kill themselves during the trial in what was meant to be the most secure prison in the country, the whole affair reached a crescendo.
The House bill would require most class-action suits for more than $2 million to be heard in federal court -- unless the "substantial majority" of the plaintiffs are from the same state as the principal defendants.
He appeared in a number of high-profile cases - including the Epping torso case, in which the principal defendants had their convictions quashed nearly 30 years later - and then joined a set led by Aubrey Myerson and Emlyn Hooson.
Prosecutors identified the five principal defendants as Denise Smith, 49, an unlicensed real estate broker based in Queens who is accused of being the ringleader of the scheme; Gail Cromer, 43, of Queens; Sonya Moody-Barksdale, 36, of Greenwich, Conn.; Daniel Levine, 49, of Brooklyn; and Rasheed Olayinka, 45, also of Brooklyn.
Medical schools and teaching hospitals, the principal defendants, are so worried that in recent weeks they have asked their allies in the Senate to enact legislation that would derail the suit, inoculating them from damages that might otherwise run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
After two years of investigation, millions of tax dollars spent and 14 weeks of testimony that touched on the sex lives of several professional athletes, the Gold Club trial sputtered out today when the federal government and the principal defendants reached plea agreements.
