Bernie Ebbers Is Old and Sick. Let Him Out of Prison.

It was an overcast day in July 2005 when Bernard J. Ebbers walked into a courthouse in lower Manhattan to learn his sentence. Four months earlier, Ebbers, the former chief executive officer of WorldCom Inc., had been convicted of overseeing an $11 billion accounting fraud, at the time the largest such fraud in U.S. history. Investors had lost billions.

Prosecutors wanted U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones to sentence Ebbers to life in prison. Ebbers’s lawyers, needless to say, pleaded for leniency, citing the many letters that had been sent attesting to his good character. Federal guidelines called for Ebbers to receive a sentence of 30 years to life. But earlier that year, the Supreme Court had ruled that sentencing guidelines were discretionary, not mandatory.