Former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez has asked to delay the prison sentence he’s expected to receive Wednesday while he appeals his conviction for selling out his office for gold bars and other bribes.
Lawyers for the embattled former Garden State pol urged a Manhattan federal judge to let him stay out of custody as he appeals, calling him a “septuagenarian who devoted half a century to public service.”
The attorneys urged Judge Stanley Stein to give the embattled Democrat — who resigned in disgrace in August — the benefit of the doubt because of his career in politics.
“A lifelong public servant should not be forced to wait out such an appeal from the walls of a federal facility,” wrote lawyers Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman.
Menendez, 71, claims the slew of favors he was found to have done for foreign governments and local businessmen do not meet the US Supreme Court’s high bar for “official acts.”
He is set to hear his fate at a sentencing hearing Wednesday at 2 p.m.
Prosecutors with the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York have asked that Menendez be jailed for more than 15 years.
Menendez’s attorneys have asked the judge to sentence him to less than two years in prison.
They argue that he’s already been punished significantly by the jury verdict, which caused him to resign “in worldwide disgrace” and made him a “national punchline.”
The feds have countered that Menendez should get a far stiffer sentence than that, given his “naked greed” in accepting a “hoard of bribes.”
They’ve also pointed out the “rare gravity” of the case, given that Menendez was the first US senator ever to be convicted of acting as an illegal foreign agent.
Read the full article here
