Bernard Kerik, the disgraced NYPD Commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, will not be seeing the outside of his minimum-security prison any time in the near future. Today a three-judge appeals panel considered the "fairness" of Kerik's four year sentence and found no reason to overturn it. Kerik’s lawyers had argued that Judge Stephen C. Robinson's four-year sentence "had been unreasonable and showed judicial bias," alleging that Robinson "took offense" at Kerik's criticism of prosecutors. But the appeals court found that rich:
"To be sure, the district court noted the irony in Kerik (or his supporters) leveling baseless accusations of corruption against the prosecutors when it was he who had 'used his (official) position for his own personal gain... In sum, we conclude that an objective observer viewing the whole record would not question the district court’s impartiality and, accordingly, we identify no ground for resentencing," the panel decided today.
Kerik's sentence was significantly longer than what he'd hoped for when pleading guilty to lying on his application to be the director of Homeland Security, lying to the feds, tax fraud, and accepting $250,000 in renovations to his Bronx apartment, provided by a company accused of having mob ties. Robinson had added more than a year to what was recommended in the plea agreement, but considering the maximum sentence was 61 years, maybe Kerik should just take it and like it. He's currently cooling his heals in Federal Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Maryland, where he sleeps in a bunk bed in a dormitory-style prison facility with dozens of other inmates. He'll be out in 2013.
