Analysis: How did Olmert get his jail time reduced and what does it mean for future cases?
Though the main headline for Tuesday was that former prime minister Ehud Olmert will be going to prison, the shocker in his case is that his jail time was reduced from six years to 18 months.
Upon hearing such a large reduction, many observers might have assumed it was due to the Supreme Court’s deference to Olmert’s service to the country as prime minister.
He certainly got that in July 2012, when the Jerusalem District Court gave him no jail time for his Investment Affair conviction for breaking conflict of interest principles, explicitly citing his contributions to the state as part of the reason.
But Tuesday that played no part in the decision.
In fact, most of the five justices involved in the decision either did not make much of his being prime minister, or like Justice Salim Joubran, they held it against him as setting a poor example by being a prime minister and mayor who took bribes.
So why was his prison sentence cut by 75 percent? The Supreme Court, by a 4-1 vote (Joubran being the one dissenter) actually threw out the largest conviction against him, accounting for 90% of the funds he was convicted of receiving as bribes (and leaving him acquitted of 96% of the bribery allegations he faced at the start of the case.) Instead, his conviction was upheld of accepting NIS 60,000 in bribes out of the original conviction for NIS 560,000.