and awarded the government prosecutors a money judgment order, essentially ignoring the jury verdict on forfeiture and awarding the US Attorney's office $3.4 million, to be paid by Banki. The defense objections throughout trial were overruled. One such overruling was the judge's decision not to allow for jury instructions on the family money exception from the sanctions law. Essentially, the jury was not told that transfer of family money is legal; that family money can be sent to and received from Iran and is an exception in the US sanctions law against Iran. This would become a material issue at the appellate level and the primary reason for the reversal of the charges. Judge Keenan also did not allow the defense to call Richard Newcomb, former head of OFAC, to testify as an expert witness on the sanctions charges despite his qualifications: he had been head of OFAC for 17 years (from 1987 to 2004), where he was the author of the sanctions law. Richard Newcomb was not only the author of the underlying sanctions regulations but in his capacity as head of OFAC he had also been in charge of enforcing the sanctions law not just against Iran but all countries US had sanctions against. Sentencing and imprisonment During sentencing, over 120 letters of support were sent to Judge Keenan to ask for leniency. Among those were letters from Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi and ex-Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Richard Newcomb. In a lengthy letter, Richard Newcomb made the case for Banki's innocence of the sanctions charges and highlighted that through Newcomb's administration of the sanctions program in the US the program was "never intended to target the Iranian people" and that "the Iranian-American community commonly and openly uses remittance forwarding service providers, including hawalas to move family funds back and forth between the United States and Iran, typically with no penalty, civil or criminal." On August 16, 2010, Judge Keenan sentenced Banki to 30 months in prison. Shortly after being sentenced Banki filed for appeal. The Iranian American Bar Association along with 10 other advocacy and civil rights groups filed a separate amicus brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The amicus brief argued that U.S.-Iran sanctions "are not aimed at the Iranian people, and therefore they contain exemptions permitting certain humanitarian transactions and family remittances." For about