Ebbers’ plea for leniency

It typically does not make news when a federal defendant asks for leniency. But when that defendant is former WorldCom Inc. CEO Bernard Ebbers, then CNN and the AP and the CBC and the NY Times and the Washington Post are all over the story. 

Interestingly, the brief that Ebbers’ legal team filed in US District Court on Friday was “accompanied by 169 letters of support written by his friends and beneficiaries of his charitable donations,” and it cited “the 63-year-old’s good character, age, poor health and low risk of repeat offense as reasons to impose less than the ‘draconian life sentence’ under the sentencing guidelines.”

UPDATE: Peter Henning at the White Collar Crime Prof Blog is boldly predicting in this post that Ebbers’ sentence “will be in the 8-10 year range.”