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Lawyers for Jeffrey Sterling, convicted earlier this year of leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen, urged today that Sterling “not receive a different form of justice” than David Petraeus, the former general and CIA director who has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for leaking classified information to his biographer. While Petraeus will not go to jail — yesterday a judge sentenced him to two years probation and a $100,000 fine — prosecutors have asked for a “severe” sentence against Sterling within federal guidelines of 19 to 24 years in prison. In January, a jury convicted Sterling, a former CIA agent, on nine counts related to leaking information to Risen, a Times reporter who in 2006 wrote a book that revealed the agency had mishandled a program to disrupt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Sterling’s lawyers, Edward MacMahon Jr. and Barry Pollack, filed their sentencing memorandum today, arguing that their client “should be treated no more harshly than any other person who has been charged and convicted of ‘leaking’ to the press.” In addition to Petraeus, they cited the cases of John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and Stephen Kim, who received a 13-month sentence. Unlike Petraeus, Kiriakou and Kim, who reached plea agreements, Sterling took his case to a jury. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 11.

“He should be treated similarly to others convicted for the same crimes and not singled out for a long prison sentence because he elected to exercise his right to trial,” the lawyers stated. “[T]he court cannot turn a blind eye to the positions the government has taken in similar cases.” The Petraeus and Sterling cases have highlighted another disparity in the government’s handling of leak cases: powerful officials like Petraeus are treated leniently while mid-level ones like Kiriakou, Kim and Sterling go to jail. In the Petraeus case, the government claims no harm was caused by his leak, because none of the information he leaked to Paula Broadwell, his biographer and onetime lover, was published, whereas the information published by Risen had caused “substantial damage” to national security. However, this characterization was called “overwrought hyperbole” by a former CIA official in a letter of support for Sterling released today by his lawyers. David J. Manners, a former station chief in Prague and Amman as well as chief of the agency’s Iran task force, described as “not credible” the prosecution’s claim that Risen’s book severely hurt the CIA’s ability to recruit spies. Manners, who first met Sterling when both worked at the agency, noted that the government itself has often disclosed the role of intelligence operatives.

“While such disclosures are never helpful, they happen all the time (and sometimes the United States quietly endorses the disclosure — read some of Bob Woodward’s books, or look at Agency collaboration on the film about the bin Laden raid),” Manners wrote. Sterling’s lawyers called attention to what they regard as another inequity in the treatment of Petraeus and their client. Petraeus admitted in his plea agreement that the classified information he leaked included highly sensitive names of covert operatives, war plans for U.S. forces, as well as details about his discussions with senior officials, including President Obama. Petraeus also admitted to lying to FBI agents about what he had done. Sterling, his lawyers noted, “revealed the names of no covert personnel and never lied about his actions to the FBI.” The prosecution appears to be trying to do more than put Sterling behind bars for two decades; it appears to be trying to rewrite history and put an end to leaks of information that embarrass the government.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison and fined NIS 1 million in court in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning for his role in the 'Holyland Affair', the real estate corruption case considered the largest of its kind in Israeli history.

The case marks the first time a prime minister was convicted of a felony and now, with his sentencing, the first time a former prime minister has ever been sentenced to jail time.

Additional sentencing included Hillel Cherney, who was the developer behind the Holyland project and was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and fined NIS 2 million. Cherney was convicted of 19 offences of corruption and a slew of additional corruption and break of trust offences.   Danny Dankner, the former chairman of Israel's second-biggest bank, also received three years in jail during Tuesday's senctencing. Dankner, who is now the joint chairman of Israel Salt Industries, was also fined a million and half shekel.   Avigdor Kelner, also a developer in the project, who was convicted of two corruption charge in the affair, was sentenced to three years and fined NIS 1 million.   Former Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski, who succeeded Olmert as the city's mayor, and Dankner, were both charged and convicted of offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to a government official to rezone land for the project.

One by one, four former Blackwater security contractors wearing blue jumpsuits and leg irons stood before a federal judge on Monday and spoke publicly for the first time since a deadly 2007 shooting in Iraq.The men had been among several private American security guards who fired into Baghdad’s crowded Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007, and last October they were convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity. Yet on Monday, as they awaited sentences that they knew would send them to prison for most if not all of their lives, they defiantly asserted their innocence.

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, strongly disagreed, sentencing Mr. Slatten to life in prison and handing 30-year sentences to the three others. A fifth former guard, Jeremy P. Ridgeway of California, had pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and testified against his former colleagues. He has not been sentenced but testified that he hoped to avoid any prison time.The ruling ended a long investigation into the Nisour Square shooting, a signature, gruesome moment in the Iraq war that highlighted America’s reliance on private contractors to maintain security in combat zones.

No such company was more powerful than Blackwater, which won more than $1 billion in government contracts. Its employees, most of them military veterans, protected American diplomats overseas and became enmeshed in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine counterterrorism operations. Its founder, Erik Prince, was a major donor to the Republican Party.

Eight Venezuelan military officials charged with involvement in last year’s infamous “Operation Jericho” plot against President Nicolas Maduro have been sentenced by a military court to between four and eight years in prison.   The men were amongst 30 mostly airforce officials arrested in March and April 2014 in connection with a plan to sow rebellion in the country’s armed forces and launch a coup against the current socialist administration of Nicolas Maduro. The plot is reported to have been planned throughout a two year period but was dramatically foiled by Venezuelan authorities in March 2014 following a series of tip offs from other members of the armed forces.   “The homeland is delivering justice! Military Tribunals sentence 8 officials from “Operation Jericho” for inciting rebelling and violating military decorum”, confirmed Defence Minister, Vladimir Padrino Lopez, on his Twitter account. Although Lopez did not give details on the length of the sentences handed down to the officials, according to press reports the men received between four to eight years each. 

The jailed officials include Andres Thomas Martinez, the great grandson of Venezuelan twentieth century military dictator, Juan Vicente Gomez, who ruled Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935, and former Vice-minister for Defence Education, General Oswaldo Hernández. They are all reported to have links to the United States government, as well as to prominent members of Venezuela’s rightwing opposition, including Member of Parliament for the Justice First party, Julio Borges, who was named in a confession by Hernandez.  The sentencing of the men follows the jailing of a ninth airforce official involved in the plot, Captain Acacio Moreno Mora, who was handed a prison term of 3 years and 11 months after pleading guilty on the first day of the high profile trial in February this year. 2014’s “Operation Jericho” is just one of several attempts to oust the Bolivarian government over the last 15 years, including a partially successful coup in 2002 which saw then-president, Hugo Chavez, forcefully deposed from office for 47 hours before he was returned by a popular rebellion. Earlier this year, another plot by airforce officials against the government was also discovered by Venezuelan authorities. Dubbed “the Blue Coup,” the plan included an attempt to assassinate the president, as well as the bombing of a series of “strategic” targets in the capital city using a Toucan warplane. 

The Blue Coup is reported to be an offshoot of last year’s Operation Jericho, with those involved having allegedly planned to release pre-recorded footage of Operacion Jericho’s General Hernandez announcing the overthrow of the Maduro government via a military uprising in order to launch the Blue Coup. Several opposition politicians such as Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma have also been linked to the Blue Coup attempt. All three signed and released a “Call for a National Transition Agreement” just twenty-four hours before the Blue Coup was scheduled to take place.  The document calls on Venezuelans to back their initiative to depose the Maduro administration and install an interim de-facto government.  Both Lopez and Ledezma are currently behind bars and awaiting trial due to their alleged involvement in the opposition street violence which erupted in 2014. Ledezma in particular is being tried for his links to paramilitary groups connected to the violence. 

The United States was singled out Monday by a United Nations expert on torture for being the only country in the world that continues to sentence children to life in prison without parole. “The vast majority of states have taken note of the international human rights requirements regarding life imprisonment of children without the possibility of release,” Juan Méndez, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment, said in his report, before noting that the United States is the only country to continue the practice. A sentence of life without parole means life and death in prison — a practice considered cruel and inhumane punishment for juveniles under both international and U.S. law.

Issuing life sentences for children is banned under numerous international laws, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child — which the U.S. and South Sudan are the only two states to have signed but not ratified. Also, a U.N. oversight body has found that the sentence violates the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, since youths of color are more likely to receive the sentence than white offenders.

Two former Deutsche Bank corporate brokers have been sentenced to one of the longest prison terms possible for the crime of insider trading in the UK. As US financial market participants walk free in the streets managing their own “home office” money, Martyn Dodgson and Andrew Hind will be rotting in a Wandsworth prison cell (among the worst reputed of England’s prisons) for up to four and half years for what the judge called “persistent, prolonged and deliberately dishonest behavior.” As Bloomberg reports, the group, including three other defendants, formed part of the FCA’s biggest insider-trading investigation dubbed Operation Tabernula. The FCA accused Dodgson and Harrison of passing inside information on possible deals from their jobs between 2006 and 2010 to Hind who the agency claimed gave them to Parvizi and Anderson to trade on. All of the men denied the charge. But as Bloomberg reports, the sentences are among the longest handed down in an FCA insider-dealing case… Martyn Dodgson, 44, was sentenced Thursday in London (to 4 1/2 years in jail)  alongside friend and accountant Andrew Hind, who was given a 3 1/2 year prison term for the same offense. The men were found guilty of insider dealing on Monday after a four-month trial.

The federal prison population has ballooned 790 percent since 1980, and almost half of those now imprisoned are there for drugs. In the coming years, the Bureau of Prisons projects that prison overcrowding will get even worse. While federal prisons are now 35 to 40 percent over capacity, they are expected by 2023 to reach 55 percent over capacity without a policy change, according to a new report by the Urban Institute. The prison population explosion was not driven primarily by a spike in crime, but by a change in punishment. Over a 25-year period, average drug sentences doubled from 38.5 months in 1984 to 74 months in 2011. And over a similar period, the percentage of convicted federal offenders sentenced to prison spiked from 50 percent in 1986 to 90 percent in 2011. Before the passage of several draconian laws that impose mandated harsh sentences and remove judicial discretion, many offenders received probation or a fine for the same violations.

Now, public officials are among those looking for a solution. And the Urban Institute found that, while no one policy change will be enough to cure the inmate population explosion, the one single thing that could have the greatest impact is reforming mandatory minimum sentences. “Cutting mandatory minimums in half could save almost $2.5 billion in 10 years,” Urban Institute Senior Fellow Julie Samuels writes. “This measure alone would reduce overcrowding to the lowest it has been in decades.” There are now several bipartisan mandatory minimum bills pending in both houses of Congress. And the bipartisan momentum has never been greater, with even the world’s largest association of corrections officials and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council urging mandatory minimum reform.

Setting in motion one of the most wide-ranging government efforts to roll back the legacy of harsh anti-crime laws dating to the drug wars of the 1980s, the Justice Department on Wednesday announced an initiative to extend presidential clemency to potentially thousands of federal prisoners who would receive more lenient rulings if they were sentenced and convicted today. 

Cole said the department would, in its effort to retrofit penalties, prioritize inmates who are nonviolent, low-level drug offenders without significant ties to large-scale criminal organizations. Such offenders must also have served at least 10 years of their prison sentences, not have a significant history of crime or violence and have demonstrated good conduct in prison. Though Cole declined to say how many prisoners that might encompass, The Associated Press, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Wednesday that the Justice Department had identified about 23,000 people who had served sentences of at least 10 years. While Cole said the most obvious candidates would be those inmates sentenced prior to the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which narrowed the disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine offenders, he said the initiative was not limited to them.

The sordid tale of marital infidelity, cyber-stalking, and spilled secrets surrounding former CIA director David Petraeus is scheduled to come to a close Thursday, when the former four-star general is sentenced for his crimes. But Petraeus’s punishment will likely have lasting ramifications on future leak cases, national security lawyers said. They argue the government is cutting its own throat by offering him a more lenient sentence in the wake of harsher penalties to other leakers and creating a double standard that can be exploited by defense attorneys in future cases.“This is a horrible choice by the government,” said Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer for more than two decades. “I think it is going to have a negative impact. The judges who are going to be truly objective are going to look at the Petraeus case. Going forward, it is going to hurt the government’s cases.”

The hearing Thursday to sentence Petraeus for giving his former girlfriend and biographer highly classified information will happen only a few miles from her home in North Carolina. Petraeus will enter his plea on one misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler in Charlotte. Petraeus is the second director of the CIA to be convicted for actions while leading the agency. President Nixon’s director, Richard Helms, was convicted in 1978 of lying to Congress about the CIA’s role in overthrowing President Salvador Allende of Chile. He received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine.

And after John M. Deutsch, who served under President Clinton, left office, he was accused of mishandling classified information on his laptop. He lost his security clearance, but he was never prosecuted. Clinton pardoned him on his last day as president. Petraeus has the distinction, however, of being the only director forced to resign because of misdeeds while serving,

COLUMBUS, OH-Former Columbus Police Officer Steven Edward Dean, 49, of Columbus, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 30 months in prison for misappropriating and selling heavy equipment and other property the Columbus Division of Police received through a Department of Defense surplus program. Carter M. Stewart, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio; Kevin Cornelius, Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Brian Reihms, Special Agent in Charge, Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS); and Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs announced the sentence handed down today by U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson. According to court documents, an investigation by the Columbus Division of Police, the FBI and DCIS concluded that between October 1, 2005 and June 1, 2012, Dean diverted property with a fair market value of $251,570.94 the police department had received from the Defense Reutilization Marketing Office (DRMO) program. The embezzled items included $133,554.59 of heavy equipment, construction equipment, and vehicles; restaurant equipment; $94,163.25 of materials sold for scrap; and $16,353.15 worth of items, including diesel generators, sold to private persons. This conclusion was based on records obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense DRMO program, the state of Ohio offices involved with the DRMO program, scrapyard receipts, Craigslist online point-of-sale website records, restaurant supply records of sold equipment, and by viewing the items of property themselves.

Federal Bureau of Investigation - Cincinnati Field Office 08/13/2014 | Press release Former Columbus Police Officer Sentenced for Embezzling from Defense Department Surplus Program

"This is a major theft and embezzlement case involving a uniformed police officer stealing from his own department and involving property which should have otherwise been used to assist law enforcement, and all the equipment and vehicles were originally purchased with taxpayer dollars," Assistant U.S. Attorneys Doug Squires and Deborah Solove told the court prior to sentencing. "Today's sentencing demonstrates the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's ongoing commitment to combating fraud and corruption that impacts the Department of Defense's vital programs and operations," said Brian Reihms, Special Agent in Charge, Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), "DCIS, with our partner agencies, will continue to work tirelessly to investigate fraud involving the DoD's DRMO Law Enforcement Support Office which transfers excess property to law enforcement organizations across the United States." Dean pleaded guilty in February to one count of embezzlement from a program receiving federal funds and one count of theft of public property. Under terms of the plea agreement, Dean will forfeit $251,570.94 less the value of the recovered equipment. Dean was also sentenced to three years of supervised released following inprisonment. U.S. Attorney Stewart commended the investigation by DCIS, the FBI, and CPD, as well as Assistant U.S. Attorneys Doug Squires and Deborah Solove, who prosecuted the case.

Sabrina de Sousa, a former agent for the US Central Intelligence Agency detained in Portugal on Monday pending extradition to Italy, was on Wednesday freed at the order of Lisbon's appeal court, after Italy's president issued a pardon reducing her prison sentence there by one year, her lawyer told Lusa.

An order from the Lisbon court stated that de Sousa should be "freed immediately", at the request of the Italian authorities.   The former spy was to have been extradited on Wednesday to Italy, where she was in 2009 sentenced in absentia to four years in prison for her involvement in the 2003 kidnapping in Milan of Abu Omar, an Egyptian national and radical Islamist. However, Italy's president, Sergio Mattarella, on Tuesday issued a pardon reducing that sentence by one year.   Under Italian law, prison sentences of up to three years may be substituted by community service. As a result the Milan prosecutor handling the case withdraw the European arrest warrant, so cancelling the extradition proceedings.  

The Justice Department is preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prison as part of an effort to ease overcrowding and roll back the harsh penalties given to nonviolent drug dealers in the 1980s and ’90s, according to federal law enforcement officials.The release is scheduled to occur from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2, and will be one of the largest one-time discharges of inmates from federal prisons in American history, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing matters that had not been publicly announced by the Justice Department.

In April, the United States Sentencing Commission created guidelines that reduced the penalties for many nonviolent drug crimes and made some of those changes retroactive. Officials said at the time that the move applied to at least 50,000 federal inmates sentenced under the previous guidelines. The new guidelines were issued amid increasing support for an overhaul of sentencing. The United States has a quarter of the world’s prison population and both Republicans and Democrats agree that prison spending, which accounts for a third of the Justice Department’s budget, needs to be reduced. News of the prison release was first reported by The Washington Post. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are considering other ways to scale back the numbers of people who are facing lengthy stays in federal prison because of nonviolent drug crimes.

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — A Portuguese court has ruled that a former CIA operative convicted of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric as part of an extraordinary renditions program should be turned over to Italy to serve her six-year sentence there, a court official said Friday. The decision to extradite Sabrina De Sousa after her arrest last October was handed down on Tuesday, the president of the court in Lisbon, Luis Vaz das Neves, told The Associated Press. De Sousa, who operated under diplomatic cover in Italy, was among 26 Americans convicted in absentia for the kidnapping of Milan cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in broad daylight from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003. Extraordinary renditions were part of the Bush administration's "war on terror" after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Egyptian cleric's kidnapping, which also implicated Italy's secret services, has proven embarrassing to successive Italian governments. De Sousa, who was born in India and holds both U.S. and Portuguese passports, was initially acquitted due to diplomatic immunity, but was found guilty by Italy's highest court in 2014. She was arrested at Lisbon Airport on a European warrant last year as she was on her way to visit her elderly mother in India with a round-trip ticket.

Authorities seized her passport and set her free while awaiting the court decision on her extradition. Manuel Magalhaes e Silva, De Sousa's Portuguese lawyer, told the AP in an email he was officially informed of the extradition decision Friday and intends to lodge an appeal at the Supreme Court. If that fails, he will go to the Constitutional Court, he said. De Sousa has argued against extradition to Italy, telling a Portuguese court after her arrest that Italian authorities tried her in absentia and never officially notified her of her conviction, according to Vaz das Neves. All of the Americans were tried in absentia and were represented for most of the proceedings by court-appointed lawyers who had no contact with their clients. Only toward the end of the trial did De Sousa and another defendant, a member of the military, receive clearance to hire their own lawyers. The Lisbon judge ruled that De Sousa should be sent to Italy so she can be notified of the conviction and possibly demand another trial, Vaz das Neves said. The judge also ruled that if De Sousa accepts her prison sentence, she must be allowed to serve it in Portugal if she wishes, which is possible under European legal procedure, according to Vaz das Neves. De Sousa has said that she had been living in Portugal and intended to settle there.

De Sousa has denied in interviews participating in the rendition and has said she wants to hold the CIA accountable. "If she truly arrives in Italy, she could finally choose to say to magistrates what she so far has only said in interviews," said the lead prosecutor in the case, Armando Spataro. De Sousa has requested a pardon from Italy. Earlier this month, in an act of clemency, Italy's president reduced the sentences of two others convicted in the case. President Sergio Mattarella reduced former CIA base chief Robert Seldon Lady's sentence to seven years from nine. Mattarella also wiped out the entire penalty — three years — faced by another American, Betnie Medero. After being kidnapped Nasr was transferred to Egypt where he claimed he was tortured. After he was released from Egyptian custody, Italian authorities in 2005 issued an arrest warrant for him. He was convicted in absentia by an Italian court in 2013 on decade-old terror charges and was sentenced to six years in prison, although he never returned to Italy to serve the sentence.

NEW YORK -- Convicted hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison for stealing internal emails from the global intelligence firm Stratfor.

Hammond, 28, has a lengthy criminal record for his protests both online and off against targets like the 2004 Republican National Convention and pro-Iraq War activists. But stealing Stratfor files as part of the online hacking collective Anonymous gave him a new level of notoriety. In May, he pleaded guilty to one conspiracy charge for hacking the Texas-based private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor. The security breach resulted in the theft of employee emails and account information for approximately 860,000 Stratfor subscribers and clients, including information from 60,000 credit cards. Although Hammond did not use the credit cards himself, he urged supporters to use them to make donations to charities. The resulting fraudulent charges led to headaches for nonprofits and for the private individuals who had their phone numbers and email addresses exposed. The government charges originally added up to 30 years in prison, but Hammond took a plea deal for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal anti-hacking law also used to prosecute internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz. He admitted to hacking several other websites, including the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Special Forces Gear, the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, and the sheriff's office in Jefferson County, Ala.

Nearly 5 million emails obtained in the Stratfor hack were turned over to WikiLeaks by Hammond and published as the “Global Intelligence Files.” They revealed domestic spying on activists, including Occupy Wall Street. The resulting media publicity led some, including 4,000 online petition backers and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, to hail him as a whistleblower. But to the federal government, he was little more than a common thief. “While he billed himself as fighting for an anarchist cause, in reality, Jeremy Hammond caused personal and financial chaos for individuals whose identities and money he took and for companies whose businesses he decided he didn’t like," United States Attorney Preet Bharara said in a May statement. On Friday, Hammond, who has been in detention for 20 months, struck back. While apologizing to the innocent people who had their personal information exposed as a result of his leaks, he lashed out at the FBI, and Hector Xavier Monsegur, an informant widely known by his online name "Sabu." For months, Hammond claimed, Sabu guided him as he hacked the Stratfor website and thousands more around the world.

In 2012, former Navy linguist James F. Hitselberger was indicted on two felony counts under the Espionage Act statutes after several classified documents were found in his possession. In 2013, a superseding indictment charged him with another four felony counts. But in the end, Mr. Hitselberger pleaded guilty this year to a single misdemeanor charge of removing classified documents without authorization. Now both the defense and the prosecution are endorsing Hitselberger’s request that any jail penalty be limited to the time he has already served, including two months in DC jail and eight months of home confinement. The sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 17. Despite the stark disparity between the multiple felony counts with which Hitselberger was charged, and the single misdemeanor of which he was convicted, the prosecution said that it had no second thoughts about the way the matter was handled.

“It is important to note that the government’s case against Mr. Hitselberger did not collapse,” prosecutors said in a June 27 sentencing memorandum. To the contrary, prosecutors wrote, “in several ways, the government’s case became stronger than what it had been when the charges were first obtained.” Defense attorneys disputed that assertion and said the government had overreached. “At a minimum, the evidence demonstrates that the government significantly overcharged the case, and the guilty plea to a misdemeanor not only was the appropriate result, but also demonstrates how the offense should have been charged from the beginning,” the defense wrote in a June 27 reply. The mountain of Espionage Act charges that yielded a molehill of a misdemeanor in this case recalls a similar progression in the prosecution of former NSA official Thomas Drake, where ten felony counts gave way to a technical misdemeanor. This recurring pattern may indicate that overcharging is a standard prosecutorial approach to such cases, or that the judicial process is effectively winnowing out excessive felony charges, or perhaps both.

A June 26 sentencing memorandum submitted by the defense presented its own account of the facts of the case, along with several moving testimonials from Hitselberger’s friends and relatives as to his character. In another pending Espionage Act case, the Obama Administration must decide if it will pursue a subpoena against New York Times reporter James Risen. For a current update, see Reporter’s Case Poses Dilemma for Justice Dept. by Jonathan Mahler, New York Times, June 27.

An Israeli court sentenced, Sunday, democratically-elected leftist Palestinian legislator, and a senior political leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Khalida Jarrar to 15 months imprisonment.

The army kidnapped the legislator on April 2nd of this year, and on April 5th, she was sentenced for six months imprisonment, under arbitrary Administrative Detention orders, without charges. On April 15, the Israeli military prosecutor’s office filed an indictment of twelve charges against Khalida Jarrar, including what it called “membership in an illegal organization,” in addition to “holding and participating in protests” in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners. The PFLP denounced the ruling and said it shows the unjust, chaotic and arbitrary nature of Israeli courts and the legal system in dealing with Palestinian political prisoners. The PFLP reiterated its firm stance in not recognizing Israeli military courts, as they are part of the illegal occupation of Palestine. It also demanded referring the file of all detained legislators to the United Nations, in addition to calling for an urgent meeting of the Security Council to discuss the issues of Palestinian political prisoners, including detained women facing constant violations.

“Israel is deliberately targeting elected and senior political leaders of various factions in Palestine,” the PFLP said, “Jarrar is an important political figure, a symbol for steadfastness and determination; she always held her head high and challenged the Israeli abuse and violations.” The PFLP also stated that Israel is trying to increase its pressure, and is escalating its violations, against Palestinian women, holding important roles in leading the national struggle against the occupation.

Fars News published the full text of the deal. It’s provisions are as follows:

In a landmark ruling, Reykjavík District Court sentenced four former executives of Kaupthing Bank to between 3 and 5 1/2 years in prison for financial crimes dating back to 2008.

In the court's opinion, the four conspired to conceal the fact that one of the investors in Kaupthing, Mohammad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, owned his 5.01% stake in the bank thanks to money lent to him by the bank itself.Investigations into the four go back to the Icelandic bank crash of autumn 2008. In the wake of a report on the contributing causes of the crash from the Special Investigative Commission, the Special Prosecutor’s Office was created. The office targeted many top bank officials from Glitnir and Kaupthing.Eva Joly, who at one point served as an assistant to the Special Prosecutor, told the Grapevine last year that Iceland should "be proud you invested in these investigations", while cautioning to have patience - investigations were three years along at the time.The four are expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. All of their prison sentences are non-probationary.

The sentencing of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling on May 11 for espionage ends one phase of a long ordeal and begins another. At age 47, he has received a prison term of 42 months—three and a half years—after a series of ever more improbable milestones.