NEW YORK, Jan. 3 (Xinhua) -- 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 Menendez's hardscrabble upbringing, life of service and devotion to family.

In a legal brief filed minutes before midnight on Thursday, the lawyers laid out Menendez's rise to political prominence in Hudson County, and a catalog of good deeds done for constituents during three decades in Congress.

As they did during Menendez's two-month bribery trial in Manhattan, his lawyers suggested that their client's greatest failing was being led astray by a conniving wife, The New York Times reported Friday.

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.

Menendez and two New Jersey businessmen 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, Menendez was found guilty of each of the 16 counts he faced, including acting as an agent of a foreign government. Enditem

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