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Former New Jersey U.S. Senator Bob Menendez is due in a Manhattan court room Wednesday to be sentenced for his conviction on charges he sold his office in return for cash and gold bars. Menendez, however, has been asking the judge to delay sentencing while his verdict is on appeal. Also, while many people want to see the disgraced ex-lawmaker receive the maximum sentence of 15 years, his lawyers claim that would be a death sentence for the 71-year-old politician and are asking for only two years. Jeffrey Lichtman is a defense attorney who hosts the “Beyond the Legal Limit” podcast on iHeart; he appeared o 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to lay out the leniency Menendez deserves.
“His lawyers are saying, ‘You’ve got to give him a break, you can’t put him in jail,’ they’re asking for a probationary sentence,” Lichtman told host Larry Mendte, “but this is not his first entanglement with the law. If you recall, he had an acquittal a few years ago, he had other charges that were dismissed about nine years ago. I mean, this is a guy that’s been involved in illegal activity for a long time- and it’s not like he stole a few bucks. This is a guy that was acting on behalf of a foreign country, a country that allowed Muslim terrorists and weapons to get into Gaza which killed Americans on October 7th; I’m talking about Egypt.”
Without pulling any punches, Lichtman says Menendez deserves no mercy when he finally is sentenced. “He’s 71 years old; he’s got to get some jail time, at least for general deterrence purposes. There’s no reason to sentence him for specific deterrence because he’s never going to be back on the job in the government that he had before, but it has to be shown to the rest of the politicians in America that if you’re going to steal, if you’re going to hurt our country, you need to perhaps die in jail. I suspect that he gets ten years, and I think it is well-deserved.”
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