Leibell’s Attorney Asks for Probation, No Prison
The defense attorney for former state senator Vincent Leibell asked the judge in the case to grant a variance from the sentencing guidelines and impose a sentence that does not include any prison time, a memorandum released Wednesday reveals.
“For this white collar middle class, over 60 year old educated professional, suburban husband and father, the thought of a single day in prison is horrifying,” David L. Lewis, Leibell’s attorney, states in the sentencing memorandum. “Counsel proposes that the Court impose a non-Guideline, non-incarcerative sentence, with appropriate alternative punishment.”
Leibell, a legislator in Albany for 28 years, pleaded guilty in December to felony counts of obstruction of justice and tax evasion. Leibell admitted to telling an attorney to lie to investigators about kickbacks he had made to Leibell; Leibell also admitted he failed to report $43,000 in kickbacks he had received.
Lewis suggested a sentence of five years probation, including a portion under house arrest, as well as community service. Lewis argues that Judge Warren Eginton should consider Leibell’s career in public service when determining Leibell’s sentence. The memorandum includes hundreds of letters from family members, friends, constituents and public officials in support of Leibell as well as a letter from Leibell himself.
“The counts before the Court today are wholly unrelated to my public service and a terrible consequence of relationships I had in the past,” Leibell writes in a Feb. 15 letter to Eginton. “Please allow me to return to my family and community without incarceration.”
Lewis further argues Leibell should be sentenced outside the guidelines because the shame he has felt, and the humiliation that comes with the downfall of a public figure, has been a penalty in itself.
“Very often one pleads for a client by saying that he has suffered enough. It may be that Mr. Leibell is the one client who has suffered enough,” Lewis says in the memorandum.
Lewis went on to cite Leibell’s Wikipedia profile, included in the supporting exhibits, which calls Leibell “a convicted felon and disgraced former politician,” and a Facebook page created about him.
The government’s sentencing memorandum, released last week, rejects the claims made in Lewis’s memorandum and calls for a two-year prison sentence, the maximum within the sentencing guidelines.
“Like most defendants who come before this court, the defendant is neither all bad nor all good,” the government memorandum, signed by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Perry Carbone and Jason Halperin, states. “The ‘good deeds’ described in the letters submitted to the court describe exactly the kind of conduct to be expected from a State Senator to his constituents.”
The prosecution strongly disputes Lewis’s assertion that Leibell’s “acceptance of responsibility and his remorse were instantaneous.” The government memorandum says Leibell knew he was under investigation as early as last May and tried to cover it up rather than coming clean. Leibell was elected county executive of Putnam last November, and the government’s memorandum reveals he watched videotape of himself asking the attorney to lie a week before the election.
“The defendant was elected to the office of Putnam County Executive fully aware that he was about to be indicted for serious federal offenses and without disclosing his crimes to the voting public, his opponent, or party officials,” the government memorandum says. “He used his official position to line his own pockets for years. And then, when law enforcement began to investigate his activities, he chose to obstruct, impede, and lie, rather than to come clean.”
The defense’s memorandum says Leibell had a tendency to abuse alcohol “as a palliative from the stress of his work as a public official and the absence of down time or privacy,” and argues that treatment and not punishment is needed.
In the government’s sentencing memorandum, the prosecutions responds it “suspects that the defendant’s newly discovered alcohol dependency may well be an attempt to game the system.”
Leibell is set to be sentenced on May 13.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.