An article from last year about Ellis and sentencing

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

28. My impression is that Ellis doesn't like prosecutors in general and Manafort's in particular.

And he is on record as regularly tangling with prosecutors, especially regarding mandatory minimum sentences. I posted the same article yesterday but it was ignored - it seems people are assuming the wrong negative things about Ellis. The guy is an eccentric old crank, and he gave Manafort a sentence much more lenient than both the prosecutor and the pre-sentence analysis recommended, but his reasons for doing so might not be those that are assumed and that are provoking all the jerking of knees.

That's not to say Ellis had particularly good or rational reasons. I thought it was pretty absurd for Ellis to describe Manafort's life as having been "blameless" before he got busted, considering that he'd been grifting and cheating and generally being bad for decades. It's not like he'd been a perfectly upstanding, law-abiding citizen for his entire life until one day, when he was in his late 60s, he decided to rob a convenience store on his way home from church. So that was bullshit, maybe a way of trying to justify a lenient sentence by a judge who, it seems to me, was trying to stick it to prosecutors he didn't like. That's a bad reason, if true, just not the reason that seems to be assumed.