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Photoshop effort to manufacture mitigating evidence proves aggravating to federal judge

By Douglas A. Berman

I just came across this amusing recent article from the New York Daily News, which reports on a novel (and highly ineffectual) effort by a fraud defendant to build a case for sentencing leniency: A career fraudster was sent to the slammer for nearly 24 years after giving a White Plains federal judge phony photos of himself doing charity work at hospitals and schools in a bumbling bid for leniency. Daryl Simon's bald-faced move included sticking a picture of himself into a shot with a physical-therapy patient, then flipping the image and placing it next to a teen student. "Evidence that his image was inserted and flipped can be seen by examining the single detail on his shirt above his fingers -- that detail appears on the left side of the shirt in the top photograph, and on the right side of the shirt in the bottom photograph," prosecutors wrote...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on July 20, 2010 (boomark / email).