THE ROBING ROOM

We just had a white collar defendant sentenced to the bottom of the guideline range for an embezzlement conspiracy. I believe he would have sentenced our client to the top of the range but for his actually listening to the arguments of counsel. He's very bright and sized up our arguments immediately. He candidly told us how little he thought of some of our arguments and we adjusted our strategy. He was a pleasure to deal with throughout our lengthy pretrial and sentencing proceedings. I believe that he would have denied every one of our pretrial motions, but no surprise there. He strikes me as a tough law and order type, which should be no surprise given his many years as a prosecutor. All in all, a very bright, industrious and hardworking judge. He seems to be always on trial. He and his courtroom deputy run a very tight ship though, moving cases along steadily. But they were amenable to my several requests for adjournments.