FINDING 11-DAY SENTENCE NOT TOO LITTLE BUT TOO LATE

Matthew Sinor was in his second year of law school at Ohio State a
couple of years ago when he heard that an Army buddy had gotten into
trouble with the law. Mr. Sinor rescheduled two exams and flew to
Mobile, Ala., to make sure nothing went awry at his friend's
sentencing hearing.

The defendant, Sgt. Patrick Lett, had served 17 years in the Army,
including two tours in Iraq, and he had pleaded guilty in federal
court to selling cocaine. It was up to Judge William H. Steele, a
former marine, to decide how to punish him.

"I don't normally see people standing before me in uniform," Judge Steele said.

Sergeant Lett's commanding officer, Capt. Michael Iannuccilli,
testified that the man he knew was "a patriot, father and a good man."

"I would gladly deploy to Iraq with him and entrust my life to him,"
Captain Iannuccilli said. "I'd trust my soldiers' lives to him. He's
been nothing but an exemplary soldier."

But Sergeant Lett had not had an easy adjustment to civilian life
when he returned home to Alabama in 2004. His fiancee left him. His
father was dying. He struggled to support his three daughters. He
drank. He remembered.

"I've seen a lot of things in two wars," he said at the hearing, in
April 2006. "But this war, I saw some very, very strange things that
happened. I lost some friends, several friends, and I seen several
comrades get killed."

For five weeks in the spring of 2004, Sergeant Lett, who had no
criminal record, went astray. A cousin who dealt in crack cocaine
offered to fix Sergeant Lett's car in exchange for some deliveries.
There were seven of them, with a total street value, Sergeant Lett
said, of $2,100. They represented, Judge Steele said, "aberrant
behavior" from "a model soldier."

Sergeant Lett re-enlisted in October 2004. He was about to deploy to
Iraq again when he was arrested. It turned out he had sold cocaine to
an undercover federal agent.

Judge Steele made plain that he wanted to give Sergeant Lett the
briefest possible sentence. But Congress had set a mandatory minimum
sentence of five years, Judge Steele said, and that is the sentence
he reluctantly imposed.

Mr. Sinor, the law student sitting in the courtroom, had studied
sentencing law with Douglas A. Berman, an Ohio State law professor
and one of the nation's leading experts on the subject. Judge Steele
had, Mr. Sinor believed, overlooked a five-part statutory "safety
valve" that permits shorter sentences for defendants with unblemished
backgrounds who played minor roles in crimes that did not involve
violence and who had told the truth about what happened. Few
defendants qualify. Sergeant Lett did.

So Mr. Sinor wrote to Judge Steele, with copies to the lawyers,
explaining the point they had all missed. Judge Steele agreed, and he
revised Sergeant Lett's sentence to time served -- 11 days.

The next day, the judge invited Sergeant Lett to his chambers for a
chat. "You should thank God for a friend like Matt," Judge Steele
said, as Sergeant Lett recalled. "I want you to go back in the
military to do some good for your country. I know I will never see
you again in my courtroom."

Later, Judge Steele amended the conditions of Sergeant Lett's
probation to allow him to carry a weapon, a necessity in his line of work.

Sergeant Lett's defense lawyer, who had been paid $10,000, did not
appreciate Mr. Sinor's intercession, which he called "insulting."

"If you think five years was a bad job on my part, then you wanted a
magician and not a lawyer," the lawyer, Glenn G. Cortello, wrote to
Mr. Sinor in an e-mail message. "When you get out of law school and
have practiced criminal law for over 20 years, I'll discuss it with you."

On the phone Monday, Mr. Cortello said Sergeant Lett "got lucky" with
his five-year sentence. "They would have been justified in giving him
20 years," Mr. Cortello said.

In April, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Atlanta
reversed Judge Steele. The decision was frank in its admiration for a
fine soldier and mechanical in its application of the law.

The appeals court did not discuss whether Judge Steele had been right
to apply the "safety valve," saying "reasonable arguments can be made
on both sides." Instead, the panel said that the law simply did not
allow Judge Steele to revise the sentence once he had imposed it.

True, there is a rule of criminal procedure that allows judges to
"correct a sentence that resulted from arithmetical, technical or
other clear error," so long as they do it within seven days. Math can
be fixed. But since Judge Steele's mistake was in his understanding
of his own power to do justice, the panel said, Sergeant Lett must
serve five years.

Put another way, Judge Steele could have sentenced Sergeant Lett to
time served at the sentencing hearing. By the next day, though, it
was too late.

Professor Berman and Douglas R. Cole, of Jones Day in Columbus, Ohio,
plan to file a petition to the Supreme Court on behalf of Sergeant
Lett on Tuesday. They are working without pay.

"This is a person who causes those who know him to go to
extraordinary lengths to help him," Mr. Cole, a former Ohio solicitor
general, said of his client.

These days, Patrick Lett, 39, installs fiber-optic lines in
Pascagoula, Miss., and he waits for word from the courts. He said he
misses the Army, which granted him a general discharge in January
2007. "I'd leave right now if they'd have me," he said.

At his discharge hearing, two of Sergeant Lett's comrades testified
by telephone from Iraq.

"Put him on a plane right now," First Sgt. Daniel Sheward said. "I'll
meet him at the airport."

Online: Documents and an archive of Adam Liptak's articles:
nytimes.com/adamliptak.

Correction: February 13, 2008

The Sidebar column on Tuesday, about a judge's efforts to reduce the
sentence he had imposed on an Army sergeant convicted of selling
cocaine, misstated the location of the appeals court that reversed
him. It was in Atlanta, not New Orleans.