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Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Courts - More on "Doing time well past their prime"
That was the heading of the most recent of the ILB's list of entries on issues surrounding the Brooke Astor estate.
The Dec. 1st entry quoted a Washington Post column that began:
Ashen-faced was the way the press described Brooke Astor's son when he heard the jury's verdict convicting him of defrauding his mother of tens of millions of dollars as she lay dying of Alzheimer's disease. Barring an appeal, Anthony D. Marshall, 85, will be sentenced in early December. He faces at least one and as many as 25 years behind bars.Daniel Wise of the New York Law Journal reports today in a lengthy story that begins:
Anthony D. Marshall, 85, the son of socialite Brooke Astor, was sentenced Monday to a least a year in state prison for looting his mother's $132 million estate.Acting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice A. Kirke Bartley gave an identical 1-to-3 year sentence to Francis X. Morrissey, 66, a lawyer charged along with Marshall of pressuring Astor to make will changes at a time she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
In sentencing Marshall, Bartley said he would have preferred a "Solomonic sentence," which would have required the "many millions" that Marshall gained from changes he extracted from the Astor will be given to the charities she "loved," and leaving Marshall to the care of "his wife and family."
Under the law, however, Bartley said he was constrained to sentence Marshall to 1-to-3 years in prison, the mandatory minimum on the top count for which he was convicted, grand larceny in the first degree.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 22, 2009 09:45 AM
Posted to Courts in general