Unlike Scooter
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/13/BAGR7QVVIF1.DTLA lawyer who admitted leaking grand jury transcripts about athletes' steroid use to The Chronicle was sentenced to 21/2 years in prison Thursday by a federal judge who upbraided President Bush for commuting the sentence of Lewis "Scooter'' Libby, the former vice presidential aide who faced an identical prison term on nearly identical charges.
"Under the president's reasoning, any white-collar defendant should receive no jail time, regardless of the reprehensibility of the crime," U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, a Bush appointee, said before sentencing attorney Troy Ellerman to prison.
Ellerman's lawyer, in seeking a lesser sentence, had cited Bush's July 2 decision to commute the prison sentence for Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. Libby was convicted of lying to federal agents and a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity.
In rejecting the defense request, White noted that Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have criticized federal judges who sentence defendants to lesser terms than the minimum provided by federal guidelines.
"Libby's sentence was within those guidelines, yet the administration said it was too harsh," said White, who spent eight years as a federal prosecutor and 24 years as a business lawyer in San Francisco before Bush named him to the bench in 2002.
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