More news on the Enron Nigerian Barge sentencing

From talking to a reporter this afternoon, I got the impression that former Merrill Lynch executive Daniel Bayly’s below-guidelines sentence of 30-months imprisonment for his role in the Enron Nigerian barge fiasco (basics here) was the result of a four-level departure for “aberrent behavior” and that the District Judge Werlein’s guideline calculations led him to reject a number of the findings made by the “sentencing jury” in the case (details here).  The word is that Bayly plans to appeal his conviction; I wonder if the government might be inclined to appeal his sentence.

Meanwhile, this afternoon according to this Bloomberg News story, Judge Werlein gave a 46 month sentence James A. Brown. The longer sentence for Brown (the hardest working man in snow business?) can be explained, in part, because he was also found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. Nevertheless, compared to the 33-year sentence urged by the government, the sentence of less than 4 years for Brown again raises questions spotlighted here about whether we are seeing a pattern of leniency in white-collar cases post-Booker.

Peter Henning over at the White Collar Crime Prof Blog has a thoughtful discussion of these sentences and related issues in this post.