Examining Mel Weiss

[WSJ_law_blog]

It took us a while, but we’ve finally made our way through most, if not all of the letters Mel Weiss submitted last Friday along with his sentencing memorandum. Click here for a post on his filing from last Friday. Click here, here, here, here and here for the first good chunk of letters.

To recap, Weiss, the former head of the law firm now known as Milberg LLP, pleaded guilty last month to racketeering conspiracy in connection with the firm’s alleged improper payments of kickbacks to class-action clients. He is slated to be sentenced on Monday. Prosecutors are seeking a 33-month sentence while Mr. Weiss would like the judge to impose a term on the lowest end of the range in his plea agreement -- 18 months, with at least half of that period either in community service and/or home confinement.

Collectively, the letters speak to the traits of kindness, integrity, as well as remorse. Several mention work on behalf of Holocaust victims, while others mention specific acts of generosity. Donald Kempf, the former chief legal officer at Morgan Stanley says that after an unexpected on-the-street encounter, Weiss offered to help Kempf find a certain kind of watch. “And he did.”

According to a letter submitted by a friend and art dealer in Sun Valley, Idaho, in a “spontaneous” gesture while in Vienna, Weiss bought the art dealer’s wife an expensive pair of boots. Weiss also submitted a letter, in which he asks to be allowed the chance to “use the skills I have developed to help others and hopefully help undo the damage I have caused.”

Reading through all these, we were of two minds. One was that Mel Weiss really does sound like a pretty good guy. The other: Is this going to have a whit of difference on his sentence? It might, says Douglas Berman, the author of the Sentencing Law & Policy blog. “It’s like chicken soup,” says Berman. “You don’t know if it’ll help, but it probably can’t hurt.”

That said, Berman says that defense lawyers still have to walk a fine line between giving a judge a complete picture of a person and, well, overdoing it. “You don’t want a judge asking whether he really wants to hear from all these people,” says Berman. “Lawyers have to ask how much they want to push the envelope.”