Written by 
With less than a month to go before Robert Menendez, New Jersey’s disgraced former U.S. senator, is scheduled to be sentenced for corruption, his lawyers submitted an emotion-laden appeal for leniency based on what they depicted as Mr. Menendez’s hardscrabble upbringing, life of service and devotion to family.
In a legal brief filed minutes before midnight on Thursday, the lawyers, Avi Weitzman and Adam Fee, laid out Mr. Menendez’s rise to political prominence in Hudson County, N.J., and a catalog of good deeds done for constituents during three decades in Congress.
As they did during Mr. Menendez’s two-month bribery trial in Manhattan, Mr. Weitzman and Mr. Fee suggested that their client’s greatest failing was being led astray by a conniving wife.
Nadine Menendez, the former senator’s wife, was charged with her husband with conspiring to trade his political influence for bribes of cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz convertible. Her trial is expected to start next month.
“The evidence showed that Senator Menendez was unaware of activities that Nadine was undertaking, including the receipt and sale of gold bars by Nadine, and cash she stored in her locked closet and her safe deposit box,” the lawyers wrote in their filing.
And in a letter of support also filed on Thursday, Mr. Menendez’s daughter, Alicia Menendez, a high-profile anchor on the cable news network MSNBC, hinted at the sacrifices her father continued to make for his wife, who was being treated for breast cancer.
“During the darkest days of his own life, he has navigated his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis with a type of grace and forgiveness I honestly do not understand but admire,” Ms. Menendez wrote.
Her letter is among more than 120 filed on behalf of Mr. Menendez, part of an attempt to justify a prison term far shorter than the 12 years recommended by the court’s probation department. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted Mr. Menendez, is expected to disclose the government’s sentencing recommendation in the coming weeks.
A spokesman for the Southern District declined to comment on the filing, as did Ms. Menendez’s lawyer, Barry Coburn.
Mr. Menendez and two New Jersey businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, were convicted in July of being at the center of a vast international bribery conspiracy. A onetime powerful Democrat who led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Menendez was found guilty of each of the 16 counts he faced, including acting as an agent of a foreign government.
Mr. Menendez, 71, has maintained his innocence and plans to appeal the jury verdict.
But the federal judge handling the case, Sidney H. Stein, has denied Mr. Menendez’s request to delay his Jan. 29 sentencing until after his wife’s trial.
In Thursday’s filing, the former senator’s lawyers argued that the probation department’s recommendation of a 12-year prison term was “draconian — likely a life and death sentence for someone of Bob’s age and condition.”
Mr. Weitzman and Mr. Fee suggested that the guidelines instead merited a sentence of no more than 27 months — and even that, they wrote, was too long.
They urged Judge Stein to consider a period of imprisonment of less than 27 months paired with “at least two years’ rigorous community service.”
“He is certain never to commit future offenses,” the lawyers wrote about Mr. Menendez. “And his current state — stripped of office and living under a permanent shadow of disgrace and mockery — are more than sufficient to reflect the seriousness of the offenses and to promote respect for the law.”
The letters of support came from former constituents, friends, family members and a small handful of elected community leaders in New Jersey.
Mr. Menendez’s son, Representative Robert Menendez, said that he hoped his father would have an opportunity to be a presence in his grandchildren’s lives, offsetting the decades of “precious moments that he missed” away from his own young family while serving in Congress.
Hector C. Lora, the mayor of Passaic, N.J., described Mr. Menendez as “a man who remembers where he came from and who carries a deep-rooted sense of responsibility toward those less fortunate.”
Danny O’Brien, a former chief of staff for Mr. Menendez, commended the former senator’s willingness to meet with students and to encourage them to “consider public service as a way of fighting for change and giving back.”
“I never observed any of the things like those charged in this matter,” wrote Mr. O’Brien, who worked closely with Mr. Menendez in Washington for at least six years. “What Bob Menendez did show me was an abiding love of country and humanity.”
The former senator’s lawyers argued that his exceedingly public fall from grace was in part punishment enough, and that it had rendered him a “national punchline” and left him in financial ruin.
“Of the countless minor indignities he now faces, his name has been stripped from an elementary school in New Jersey,” they wrote. “His once broad circle of friends and political allies have largely disappeared.”
The filing also included a statistical analysis of other recent sentences for public corruption and concluded that there was “no reason whatsoever to presume that the guidelines provide useful guidance in bribery cases.”
The filing cited the sentences of a half-dozen disgraced former New York political luminaries, including Joseph Bruno and Dean Skelos, both former leaders of the State Legislature.
A review of these cases, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers wrote, suggests that a sentence of just half of what has been proposed “would be one of the harshest ever imposed.”
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.