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4.2.12 WC: 191694 not such thing—defraud or deceive the PTL Partners! That was the last day the Texas firm worked as part of our legal team. We waited several months for the decision. Finally, it was released. The Court of Appeals ruled that the conviction was valid but the 45 year sentence was not. In vacating the sentence, the court established a powerful precedent against a judge using his own religious beliefs as a factor in determining the degree of punishment. This is what they said about the role of religion in sentencing: Courts have held that sentences imposed on the basis of impermissible considerations, such as a defendant's race or national origin, violate due process. [W]e believe that similar principles apply when a judge impermissibly takes his own religious characteristics into account in sentencing. Courts... cannot sanction sentencing procedures that create the perception of the bench as a pulpit from which judges announce their personal sense of religiosity and simultaneously punish defendants for offending it. Whether or not the trial judge has a religion is irrelevant for purposes of sentencing. Regrettably, we are left with the apprehension that the imposition of a lengthy prison term here may have reflected the fact that the court's own sense of religious propriety had somehow been betrayed. The court vacated the sentence “with genuine reluctance” because they believed Bakker was indeed guilty: Yet, the fact remains that this case involves the explicit intrusion of personal religious principles as the basis of a sentencing decision. [O]ur review of the sentencing transcript reveals comments that are, in the end, too intemperate to be ignored. Because an impermissible consideration was injected into the sentencing process, we must remand the case [to a] different district judge to ensure that the ends of due process are achieved. This was precisely the result we asked for: resentencing by a judge other that Maximum Bob, who surely would have imposed the same sentence without referring to his religion. The new judge eventually reduced the sentence to 8 years and Bakker was released after serving 4.5 years—quite a reduction from the 45 years originally imposed by Maximum Bob. Following our victory in the Jim Bakker sentencing appeal, Tammy Faye Bakker declared the judicial ruling “a great victory for Christianity.” I responded that “the fact that a Jewish lawyer helped bring that about must show that it was a great victory for all Americans.” The New York Times reported further on her reaction to our victory. Tammy Faye Bakker says Mr. Dershowitz has singlehandedly restored her faith in lawyers. "Jim and I are really sold on him and think he's the greatest," she said. "He certainly is worthy of every penny he makes." (In fact, his bill was $20,000, contributed largely by the Bakkers' backers.) 304 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017391